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STEPS IN THE DARK 









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“A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no 
longer hesitate to shorten our woes” 

OUR ETERNITY—MATERL1NCK 














MILTON MAYER 

AND 

JOHN HOWE/ 


THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 

1931 


'M 


2 - 






Copyright, 1931, by 

THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 


Printed in United States of America 


©CIA 40602 1^-- 

flUG -3 1931 


PREFACE 


T HE SCIENTIST is full of curiosity. He is forever 
asking questions about what he sees. He may be quieted 
for the moment, but he is determined upon getting an answer 
sometime. He is not satisfied; he is troubled in mind and spirit. 

In laboratories, in dissecting rooms, in observatories, in the 
cold of the Arctic Circle, on the sands of the African desert, 
in fields of waving wheat, in cities buried beneath the debris of 
thirty centuries, in prisons, even in the humble family kitchen, 
the scientist is working away to find out the why and what 
and when and how of things. 

How eyes are transplanted—What fasting does—Weigh¬ 
ing human souls—Making wheat immune from disease—How 
to know when there is oil hundreds of feet under the earth— 
That new ninth planet that hid from us so long—Why the bus- 
driver did not hear the whistle when he drove into the path 
of the flier—Why it is best to do the dishes one particular way 
—When shady dealings in real estate began—What is hap¬ 
pening in the so-called American home . . . . It is a 

fascinating chain of subjects which lures the eye on from page 
to page. 

To read this book is to enter upon high adventure. And 
when we lay it down it is with genuine regret that we take leave 


of this dear, impossible person, this scientist, this fanatic, if 
you will, as, with test-tube and microscope in his hands and 
with fearless resolve in his heart, he steps forward boldly— 
on into the dark. 

Philip Schuyler Allen 

The University of Chicago 


CONTENTS 


PART 1—In Politics and Human Nature 


I 

The Lie Detector 

13 

II 

Psychoanalyzing Politics 

25 

III 

Weighing Human Souls 

29 


PART II—The New Past 


I 

A Yankee Visits Our First People 

37 

II 

The First Scientist 

44 

III 

Americans Speak American 

51 

IV 

Bally-Hoo Among the Ancients 

60 

V 

Beating the Law in Babylonia 

67 

VI 

A Prehistoric Garbage Heap 

72 


PART III—In Commerce and Industry 


I 

Listening for Oil 

79 

II 

The Robots are Coming 

87 

III 

Diagnosing a Railroad Whistle 

93 


PART IV—Man and His Ills 


I 

Tracking Down the “Flu” Germ 

103 

II 

The Story of Ethylene 

113 

III 

Mice Tell Us About Cancer 

123 


IV 

Hunger—for Food and for Facts 

131 

V 

The Art of Doing Nothing 

140 


PART V—Families of Wheat and Men 


I 

Is the Family Doomed 

149 

II 

Dish-Washing as a Fine Art 

157 

III 

Disease-Proof Wheat 

161 


PART VI—Toward Understanding the 



Human Machine 


I 

Transplanting Eyes 

173 

II 

Thinking as a Chemical Process 

180 

III 

As a Rat Thinketh 

186 

IV 

Is Weather Sense Good Sense? 

194 

V 

How Old Was Tom? 

197 


PART VII—Into the Cosmos 


I 

“Shooting” the Moon 

205 

II 

New Light on the World's Birth 

213 

III 

Finding the Ninth Planet 

219 


STEPS IN THE DARK 





PART I 


In Politics and Human Nature 





a 


Chapter I 


THE LIE DETECTOR 

P UT me back on the machine. I won’t resist it any 
longer. ... I won’t move. I’ll let the machine find 
out what it can. I’ll sit perfectly quiet and let the machine 
find out where the grave is. If the machine finds it out and 
you find the grave, then that will only be a circumstance 
against me and I may be able to beat the case so that you 
can’t hang me. . . . Put the machine on me. . . . 
Put the machine on me. . . .” 

KKK 
It all began on September 3, 1928, when an advertisement 
appeared in the classified columns of a Seattle newspaper, de¬ 
scribing an automobile offered for sale by James E. Bassett, of 
Annapolis, Maryland. The young man had driven across the 
country to Seattle, where he visited relatives, pending his depart¬ 
ure for the Philippines on a government appointment. 

The following day the advertisement was answered by a 
gaunt, unimpressively agreeable man. The owner and the 
prospective customer left in the car together. 

Bassett was never seen again. 

A description of the car—it was one of a few of its type on 


13 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


the Coast—was broadcast through Washington, Oregon, and 
California, together with some details of the “customer’s” 
appearance. A week later an automobile broke through a 
traffic signal in Oakland, California, and a traffic policeman 
jumped on the running-board. The car, with its occupants, was 
taken to the police station. 

At the station the car was recognized as Bassett’s. Among 
the articles heaped in the tonneau were a tear-gas gun, a poison 
pistol, and some personal property, including a watch that was 
later identified as a trophy Bassett had won as a tennis star 
at Annapolis. 

The circumstances were incriminating. The suspect—he 
gave the name of Earl Decasto Mayer—was held, as was his 
mother, who had accompanied him in the car. The Seattle 
authorities extradited Mayer for trial. 

County Prosecutor Ewing D. Colvin wanted to indict the 
man for murder, but was thwarted by the problem of the corpus 
delicti . The victim’s body, indispensable to the prosecution of 
murder charges in Oregon, was missing. He questioned the 
prisoner for days, utilizing every legal method practicable for 
the acquisition of information. But Mayer was wily; Colvin 
recognized in this man a cunning, experienced criminal, obdu¬ 
rate and alert. 

The official investigator found that Earl Mayer was, as a 
matter of fact, a versatile desperado and a persistent one. He 
had “done time” in the penitentiaries of five States—Montana, 
Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Washington. Automobile steal- 


14 



THE LIE DETECTOR 


ing was the chief charge, but there were other offenses. Only a 
short time before Bassett disappeared, Mayer had been released 
from the Federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. 

Before this time, Mayer had been the sole suspect in three 
murders (murders by implication only, since the bodies were 
never found), and on all three occasions he had slipped free 
because of the failure of the State to establish the corpus delicti. 

There was little doubt in the prosecutor’s mind of the man’s 
guilt—not of grand larceny alone, but of murder as well. The 
law, however, cannot convict on the mere ground of certainty 
in the minds of prosecutors; for the minds of prosecutors are, 
alas! not infallible. The law, however, can protect society 
against an individual who has trespassed repeatedly. There 
was no question about his possession of the stolen property. 
The upshot of the affair was that Mayer was condemned to 
prison for life as an habitual criminal. But the disappearance 
of the young government man was not forgotten. 

A year passed. Mayer had been returned to the King 
County jail in Seattle, pending an appeal of his conviction as 
an habitual criminal. 

Meanwhile, in Washington, D. C., young Bassett’s father 
had met a man whose name he had frequently heard. This was 
Chief August Vollmer, of the Berkeley, California, police, 
known throughout the country as “the scientific policeman.” 

As a leading advocate of scientific methods for combatting 
crime and criminals, Vollmer had gained a reputation in his 
profession. He had joined the faculty of the University of 

15 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


California, where he instructed interested members of the 
younger generation in the application of a new technique in 
police work. 

Vollmer was conversant with the Bassett case. He was asked 
whether he could help find the missing man. He could help, he 
thought—and then he added, “perhaps.” He had a machine, 
he explained, which had come to be called “the lie detector,” 
invented by a youthful criminologist, one of his students. 

Had they ever actually applied it? The scientific policeman 
admitted that they had—in about 10,000 cases, and subsequent 
developments had never contradicted the evidence given by the 
lie detector. In short, they had used it without a single failure. 
It was a simple machine, though it had a formidable name: it 
was called a pneumo-cardio-sphygmograph. 

How did the lie detector work? Was it recognized in a court 
of law? Could you force a man to submit to it? No, you 
couldn’t force people to submit to it. But you didn’t have to. 
The innocent were eager to absolve themselves; the guilty were 
afraid to incriminate themselves by refusing. 

And the courts? No, they didn’t recognize the lie detector. 
And why should they? Courts are conservative. To them, this 
device was merely a scientific experiment. Courts were not 
interested in soul-searching; they recognized only facts, based 
on strictly interpreted rules of evidence. 

How did the lie detector work? Like a simple device used 
by physicians for testing blood pressure—modified by a few 
embellishments. 


16 



THE LIE DETECTOR 


The lie detector resorted to no “third degree” methods. It 
merely recorded the subject’s blood pressure, together with his 
heart-beat and his breathing, while he answered questions. The 
subject sat in a comfortable chair and extended his arm as he 
would for a blood pressure test. Around it the operator wound 
a rubber tourniquet, and another over the chest. 

The breathing, heart action, and blood pressure of the subject 
moved penlike needles on a slowly revolving cylinder covered 
with ruled paper. Under normal conditions, the needle marked 
steady zigzag lines on the paper, indicating that the bodily 
condition of the subject was relaxed. 

Asked, “Do you enjoy cold weather?” or “Do you like 
candy?” the subject could answer, unhesitatingly, “Yes” or 
“No.” And the needles would scratch their regular zigzag path 
across the paper, revealing no emotional disturbance in the 
subject. 

But, “Did you murder this man?” Even an innocent person 
recoils from so brutal a question, fired point-blank on the heels 
of “Do you enjoy cold weather?” and “Do you like candy?” 
He is shocked by the naked suddenness of the question and the 
lie detector impartially records the shock. 

The innocent person answers, with truth, “No.” His voice 
may have been steady; he may have manifested no signs of 
perturbation. But the dancing needles of the lie detector have 
done their work by the time the answer is given. The chart 
tells the story. If it could speak, it could not more eloqently 
tell the scientist than it does by its record, “This person’s blood 


17 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


pressure rose slightly—about five millimeters—when he was 
asked if he had committed murder. That is the normal reaction 
of any person at whom such a question is leveled. This person, 
although he himself may not have been conscious of loss of 
composure, is guilty of what the layman calls nervousness—a 
failing common in one degree or another to all men. He is not 
guilty of murder.” 

Again, to another, “Did you murder this man?” 

“No,” the suspect may answer glibly. He may look his 
interrogator in the eye, and smile; his voice may be steady. 
“This man looks honest to us,” the court might say. “He is 
ready with his answers. He looks at us squarely, his eyes 
betoken his innocence. Let’s give him another chance.” 

But the lie detector testifies with the same impartiality as 
before: “This person’s blood pressure rose forty millimeters. 
His reaction is clearly that of a criminal. That question carried 
him back to the crime he committed; that which, for want of a 
better term, you call the subconscious, broke through a carefully 
schooled exterior and sent a surge of horror and fear tearing 
through his physical being. His heart actually stopped beating 
for a fraction of a second, and then went on a rampage. He 
may not have felt these sudden changes; they staggered his 
whole constitution, without, perhaps, letting him know it, and 
certainly without any indication of it to you. Outwardly he 
showed never a twitch—never a shadow of ‘nervousness.’ He 
is guilty of murder.” 

The elder Bassett besought Vollmer to bring his machine to 


18 



THE LIE DETECTOR 


Seattle. Vollmer could not go himself, but he sent one of his 
disciples, Leonarde Keeler, who had spent many of his high 
school days watching and wondering in the Vollmer laboratory, 
until he himself had become a budding criminologist. 

The missing man’s father wired Prosecutor Colvin. Colvin 
had small faith in magic contrivances. But he had tremendous 
respect for Vollmer. If Vollmer believed that the strange 
machine known as the lie-detector had the ability to catch 
criminals, there must be something in it. 

“Lifer” Mayer found Scientist Keeler an affable fellow. A 
lie detector, they called it? Yes, that was what they called it. 
“Lifer” Mayer seemed faintly amused. “You should have tried 
that on me seventeen years ago,” he observed. It had been 
seventeen years since Earl Decasto Mayer, habitual criminal, 
had fenced with the law for the first time—and lost. 

In a barren, sunless chamber of the rickety courthouse of 
King County, Washington, science undertook the unraveling of 
a crime that had successfully baffled the law. 

Prosecutor Colvin watched the needles. 

Q. Did you steal Bassett’s automobile? 

A. No, sir. (The needles jumped. “A lie,” said the 
machine.) 

Q. Did you stab Bassett with a knife? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you poison Bassett? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you dope Bassett? 


19 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you shoot Bassett? 

A. No, sir. (The needles jumped, zigzagged. “His heart 
muscles contracted,’’ said the machine. “He tried to control 
his respiration, but his blood pressure went up. He lied.”) 

Q. Did you strangle Bassett? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you destroy the body? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you burn the body? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you cut up the body? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you destroy the remains with a chemical? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you bury the body? 

A. No, sir. (“His heart action altered; his blood pressure 
started up; his respiration was affected. Hold on to that ques¬ 
tion,” the machine told the prosecutor.) 

Q. Did you leave the remains out in the open? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you sink the remains in water? 

A. No, sir. 

Q. Did you bury the remains? 

A. No, sir. (Again the needles fluttered, this time not as 
wildly as they had at the third question preceding. “He was 
‘set’ for it this time,” the machine said, “but he lied.”) 


20 



THE LIE DETECTOR 


For eight days, Mayer was questioned. Trapping expe¬ 
rienced criminals by the more or less gentle procedure of 
interrogation is not easy. It is especially hard when the 
experienced criminal is at liberty to rise, bow with a gesture 
toward the door, and remark, “Gentlemen, the interview is 
ended.” This was the prerogative of the prisoner undergoing 
this cross-examination. Mayer was rich in the sinister wisdom 
of the fox. But his cunning met its match in the youthful 
Keeler. 

Above all things, Mayer had to be kept from knowing that 
the lie detector was seeking to pin him directly to the murder 
of Bassett. There were, consequently, hours of circumlocution 
and repetition. 

Satisfied that they had learned the manner in which the body 
had been disposed of, Scientist Keeler and Prosecutor Colvin 
pursued a course calculated to find the grave of the missing 
man. That was more important than establishing the subject’s 
guilt, of which the prosecutor was already certain. But such 
information was useless without the prosecution’s ability to 
produce the corpse. 

They evolved a simple procedure in which elimination was 
to solve the mystery. A map of the whole district between 
Oakland, California, and the Canadian border was split into 
ten segments. Then, with the needles of the lie detector etching 
their curious furrows across the revolving record, they pointed 
to each segment of the map, and asked: 

“Did you bury the body here?” 


21 



Steps in the dare 


Ten times they asked the question. Ten times the prisoner 
answered “No.” Nine times the machine said, “He speaks the 
truth.” The tenth segment included the Seattle district. 

“Did you bury the body here?” 

Mayer’s heart action leaped like the mercury in a thermometer 
suddenly immersed in boiling water. The needles of the lie 
detector reeled off jagged streaks on the record. He had 
answered again, “No.” Science said, “He lies.” 

The procedure was repeated. Sometimes the Seattle area 
was indicated first, sometimes fourth or fifth, sometimes tenth. 
Each time the man’s emotions ran wild when he answered “No” 
to the prosecutor’s query about the Seattle segment. The inter¬ 
rogators saw their subject’s excitement mount as a glimmer of 
suspicion that he had unwittingly confessed crossed his mind. 
In a flash, they left the trail and plied him with decoy questions 
about specific areas in Oregon and California. 

But after eight days they had peeled off the hundreds of 
square miles on which they were working; the small residuum, 
to which the lie detector now responded, was a mile and a half 
in area. There were three cemeteries in it. In this gloomy 
patch of land, also, there was “the little white house,” one of 
several on which Mayer had obtained options some weeks before 
Bassett disappeared. In this little white house, the lie detector 
had told them, James E. Bassett was murdered. 

According to Prosecutor Colvin, Mayer interrupted a ten- 
minute intermission during a session with the lie detector and 
asked to speak to Colvin alone. It was two hours before the 


22 



THE LIE DETECTOR 


dawn of November 19, 1929. Alone in the little room with 
the prosecutor, Colvin alleges, Mayer confessed having killed 
Bassett, and agreed to show where he had buried the body. 
Keeler and two others, listening at the door, heard the con¬ 
fession. 

But here Mayer’s attorney intervened; he protested that the 
use of the lie detector was “torture,” and he invoked his client’s 
“constitutional rights.” The law upheld its precedents, and, 
with a wave of a robed arm, the lie detector was banished. 

The dismissal did not symbolize the defeat of science. 
Science fights its battles with darkness, not with men. The law 
in this case thought it was ready for science—but it was not. 

The lie detector, in thousands of cases, had proved its use¬ 
fulness to society. In one of the most remarkable instances of 
modem criminal history, it found a man innocent of murder 
when the authorities “knew” they had the right prisoner. 

A murder was committed in Salt Lake City, Utah. Three 
witnesses were alleged to have seen the killing. The mur¬ 
derer’s description was broadcast throughout the country, and 
within a month a vagrant had been apprehended and identified 
by the three witnesses. 

He was picked up in Richmond, California, where he ad¬ 
mitted that he had arrived directly from the vicinity of the 
murder. His statements were contradictory, his behavior 
strangely evasive. In his bleary, confused testimony, he ad¬ 
mitted having been in the Utah capital, admitted even that he 
“might have killed the guy.” 


23 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


The officers who had captured the fellow suggested that he 
be taken to Berkeley and tested by the lie detector. This was 
done. The scientists asked him the key question: 

“Did you kill this man?” 

“No,” came the answer. 

The needles did not jump. The lie detector delivered its 
verdict: 

“This man speaks the truth. He is innocent.” 

But public opinion had been aroused against the man, and 
he was held. A month later it developed that he had been in 
jail for vagrancy on the day of the murder, in a town almost a 
thousand miles away from Salt Lake City! He was freed, and, 
with a magnificent display of nonchalance, he wandered shab¬ 
bily, aimlessly, dustily out of town—a humble beneficiary of 
science. 

Almost a year later the real murderer was found in Los 
Angeles and arrested. 


24 



Chapter II 


PSYCHOANALYZING POLITICS 

I S AN alderman a fat fool? Is he a fraud, a crook, a joke, a 
piker, another grafter? Is a mayor an ass, a bum, a half¬ 
wit, a hippo, a rotten egg, a monkey? Is a building-inspector a 
boodler, a no-good, a fake, a loafer? 

Or do you feel more generous toward such institutions of 
public administration? 

Or don’t you care? 

If a stranger came up to you on the street, with a pencil and 
a piece of paper, and asked you to write down the first word that 
came into your mind when he said “policeman,” what would 
that word be? 

Psychologists in recent years have been making an increasing 
use of the so-called “word association tests.” These tests have 
enabled them to probe deeply into the subconscious mind, which 
is the seat of many personal ills and maladjustments. Espe¬ 
cially significant inferences have been drawn when such tests 
are applied individually to a large group of persons, and their 
spontaneous, uncensored responses obtained and compared. 

Not long ago this simple device of modern psychology was 
adopted by a political scientist in an attempt to ascertain in 


25 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


an effective way the intimate personal relationship between the 
members of a community and that community’s civic adminis¬ 
tration—the attitude of the public toward municipal leaders 
and institutions. 

The results of the test, which was conducted by Professor 
Leonard White, public administration expert of the University 
of Chicago and later civil service commissioner of Chicago, 
offer some amazing—and amusing—facts. 

About seven hundred persons, representing a wide variety of 
social and intellectual levels, were questioned by Professor 
White. An analysis of the “word associations” which the 
inquiry elicited revealed a general distrust and a remarkably 
low opinion of politicians, their ethics, their aesthetics, their 
activities, and even their personal appearances. 

In view of the fact that the test was carried out on the streets 
of Chicago only, it may be presumed that the reactions were 
conditioned by the state of affairs in that city. But this narrow 
viewpoint could not be avoided, because men and women are 
bound, by the limitations of experience, to form general judg¬ 
ments on the basis of the local situation. 

The investigator chose as “stimulus words” alderman, build¬ 
ing inspector, city hall, civil service, elections, health depart¬ 
ment, mayor, policeman, politics, and school board . 

The test was conducted during the dramatic period imme¬ 
diately preceding the April, 1928, primary election in Chicago. 
The home of a candidate for State’s attorney had just been 
bombed, and on the day of the election a candidate for ward 


26 



PSYCHOANALYZING POLITICS 


committeeman was murdered. Recriminations among candi¬ 
dates had been more vicious than ever before. 

The test, which was given to exactly 690 subjects, contained 
thirty words, twenty of which were inserted to disguise the true 
intent, which was to gain data for public administration study. 
These twenty “duds” also served as a barometer of the nor¬ 
mality of the individuals. 

The distribution of the responses into categories of “favor¬ 
able,” “neutral,” and “unfavorable” was handled by a com¬ 
mittee consisting of a business man, a housewife active in club 
work and politics, a labor manager, an employe of the Chicago 
Civic Opera Company, a professional stenographer, and an 
attorney. 

Examination of the responses to the ten “key” words disclosed 
1,159 unfavorable connotations and 761 favorable ones, out of 
6,026 answers. The rest were neutral. 

An extremely favorable reaction to the stimulus “health 
department” was obtained; 17.76 per cent of the reactions were 
favorable, against a mere 1.86 per cent unfavorable. In the 
cases of “civil service” and “policeman” excellent reactions, 
also, were noted. 

“Alderman,” with a 9.87 percentage of favorable reactions 
to 23.7 unfavorable, and “city hall,” with a 3.45 to 23.56 per 
cent comparison, demonstrated the general distaste for the polit¬ 
ical sector of city government. “School board” (politically 
appointed) and “mayor” were also aligned with this group, the 
latter word calling forth the most antagonistic reaction. 


27 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Besides the epithets listed at the beginning of this chapter, 
there were numerous other interesting reactions to the “stimulus 
words.” Some of the most piquant were: 

To the word “mayor,” abuse of power, bah!, crazy, disgrace, 
impossible, dishonest, laughing-stock of the world, and ability, 
dignity, intelligence, order. 

To the word “policeman,” arrogant, bungler, dumb, grafter, 
and efficiency, fine, guardian, handsome, protection. 

To the word “alderman,” bay window, big cheese, corruption, 
useless, and city father, honest, leader, public serrice. 

Many persons might hesitate to express their real opinion, in 
reply to direct questions; they might even, for one reason or 
another, try to camouflage their reactions. But the subconscious 
mind reports the true attitude of the individual, often when 
he himself is unaware that he harbors such an attitude. 


28 



Chapter III 


WEIGHING HUMAN SOULS 

A FEW years ago Hinton G. Ciabaugh wondered where 
to turn. He had devoted his life to the rehabilitation 
of criminals. For more than a score of years he had been 
hearing and sifting, adopting and discarding advice. He was 
chairman of the Parole Board of Illinois. He had restored— 
or refused—liberty to thousands of men, weighing them by 
such scales as were available for society’s welfare and protection. 

What were his standards? Had they proved to be sound 
and wise? He did not know. Should the present parole 
system continue? Or, what is an even more perplexing ques¬ 
tion, can it endure into the future? Must it go, and with 
it the indeterminate sentence? Is it simply inefficient in fact, 
although ideal in theory? 

The man who had to—and could not—answer these ques¬ 
tions for the People wondered if applied science could help. 
He took his case to the three leading educational institutions 
of his state: the Universities of Illinois and of Chicago, and 
Northwestern University. At his request, the president of 
each of these seats of learning appointed one of the ablest men 
on the faculty to see what could be done. 


29 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


These three men were Andrew A. Bruce (Northwestern), 
Albert J. Hamo (Illinois), and Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago). 
They constituted a committee which immediately went to work 
on the problem. 

A year’s survey of the five penal and reformatory institu¬ 
tions in Illinois, together with a thorough analysis of criminal 
records, penal records, and (when available) the life records 
of 3,000 men who had been paroled, convinced the committee 
that— 

With the introduction of the parole system, the period of 
incarceration of criminals, instead of decreasing, increased. 
Crime had spread rapidly, but the parole system, properly 
administered, could keep pace with it. The prospect of parole 
and its realization had not hardened criminals, nor had it 
created them; on the contrary, parole had proved appreciably 
beneficial to society by transforming bad men into good. 

The committee found the weakness of the parole system to 
lie chiefly in the heavy handicap put upon the Board by lack 
of useful and authentic information. The history of the 
petitioner for parole is put before the Board in a condition so 
befuddled and fragmentary as to be almost useless. The life 
record of the prisoner is often never mentioned. His reaction 
to conviction and imprisonment, his amenability to correction, 
and his prison-list of offenses are frequently omitted. 

Statistical correlation—the major tool of the social sciences— 
was called into play by the committee, which chose to regard 
the situation as a “model problem.” For each of the 3,000 


30 



WEIGHING HUMAN SOULS 


paroled men who were studied, the scientists obtained data on 
twenty-one phases of the man’s life history, his social back¬ 
ground, his personality type, his criminal and prison career. 

Against the matrix of these facts the scientists then aligned 
the records of the men subsequent to their paroles—what they 
had done with their new freedom. Comparing the pre-parole 
and post-parole records through an elaborate system of per¬ 
centages, the committee worked out formula for predicting 
the probable behavior of men who are up for parole on the 
basis of each combination of twenty-one characteristics of 
their lives. 

Here was the demonstration of science’s method of attacking 
a problem—this time the problem of predicting human conduct, 
of weighing human souls. 

Farm boys and immigrants are the state’s best “risks” for 
parole, and seem to make the most satisfactory adjustments 
after release, the committee told the Board. Hobos, ne’er-do- 
wells from the city, and older drug addicts, are all liable to 
violate parole. 

“Those of inferior intelligence are as likely, perhaps more 
likely, to observe the parole rules than are those of superior 
or average intelligence,” said Dr. Burgess. “Here, as in other 
situations, personality traits are more important than bright¬ 
ness. The man with the egocentric personality pattern faces 
the greatest difficulty in social readjustment. The emotionally 
unstable, however, seem to have the least difficulty in keeping 
a clean record under supervision. 


31 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


“Most young offenders work in gangs. These are fairly 
good subjects for parole. The men who work alone, the ‘lone 
wolves, 5 are among the least suitable. Men who have lived 
in residential neighborhoods, men who have had permanent 
employment, are better subjects than those who lived in hobo- 
hemia, rooming houses, and underworld districts and men who 
have had only occasional employment. Men punished in 
prison and men who have served long terms are poor subjects 
for parole. Men paroled on murder, manslaughter, and sex 
offenses show a low rate of violation, while men committted for 
fraud, forgery, and burglary have a high rate. 55 

The committee submitted these and other findings to the 
Board, knowing full well that such a fact-finding procedure as 
they recommended was costly. Behind every obstacle to the 
efficient functioning of the Parole Board, they acknowledged, 
is the lack or the misappropriation of money. 

There is lack of funds to hire intelligent, humane prison 
guards; to provide recreation, and physical and mental stimu¬ 
lation for the inmates; to assemble complete, authentic histories 
of convicts. There is lack of funds to free the prosecuting 
attorney’s office and the judiciary from sinister “influence; 55 to 
double or treble the forces necessary for the real reform of 
the law-breaker and the ultimate protection of the community; 
to free the Parole Board from political obligations and to 
guarantee its complete isolation from partisan clutches. 

They recommended that the Parole Board enjoy the status 
and independence of the State Supreme Court, with compen- 


32 



WEIGHING HUMAN SOULS 


sation on a par, so that men and women of highest qualifications 
may be attracted to its membership. 

Will these air-castle funds make crime costlier to the state? 
No, not if they make possible the perfecting of the parole 
system. If this system is abandoned, or even curtailed, the cost 
of crime will increase enormously at once. If the average prison 
term be increased but one year—and with the elimination of 
parole it would be increased many years— the erection of new 
penitentiaries and reformatories, at a staggering expense to the 
taxpayers, will be imperative. 

It is true that the perfection of the parole system demands 
the appropriation of a vast sum of money, but the committee 
felt justified in guaranteeing that within a few years it would 
result in enormous savings—in cold cash—to the state. 

X X X 

Ten men sit around a long table. We see that they are 
blindfolded. Blindfolded, they pass judgment on 3,000 men 
and grant them freedom, readmitting them into the society 
they had offended. How many of these men make good— 
justifying the ten blindfolded men who weighed their souls? 

It is shown that 75 per cent of the 3,000 made good. This 
means that they did not violate their paroles during the three 
to six years that they had been at large when Bruce, Harno, 
and Burgess appeared upon the scene. The remaining 25 
per cent violated the trust that society had reposed in them. 
Of these backsliders, 16 per cent were returned to penal 
institutions. 


33 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Out of the 75 per cent another 10 per cent later on were 
apprehended for new offenses, committed after their release 
from parole. 

In other words, the blindfolded Parole Board did a 65 per 
cent successful job. It will be generally admitted that, in the 
face of existing conditions, this is a favorable record. But 
could not the 65 per cent be raised to 85 or 90 per cent, or 
even higher, if the parole system were reorganized upon a more 
efficient basis? The scientists think so. 

The parole system is here; to abandon it would be to retrace 
the steps of progress in dealing with offenders against society. 
But it can be made a still more efficient instrument for salvaging 
human life. And Bruce, Harno, and Burgess, summoned from 
their laboratories, have shown how this can be done. 


34 



PART II 


The New Past 






Chapter I 


A YANKEE VISITS OUR FIRST PEOPLE 

E NOUGH moonlight, reflected from the snow, filters in 
through the entrance to light up the blurred scene inside. 
A group of figures, ten perhaps, squat in a rough circle. By 
their faces, seamed and seared and scorched like blasted cliffs, 
they are recognizable as men. They are clumsily clad in 
heavy furs. Either the furs are impenetrable or they themselves 
are oblivious to the cold—or both; for a thermometer from the 
white man’s country would register 60 degrees below zero, 
Fahrenheit. 

These are not white men. In their setting, they have the 
general appearance of Eskimos. But a cursory scrutiny of 
their faces and skins reveals them unmistakably as Indians. 

They are not voluble, but from time to time one or another 
member of the group mumbles some strange syllables. His 
fellows do not hear him, it seems; for there is no reply. They 
understand him, of course, because they all speak the same 
language—a language in which one sound uttered at four 
different pitches has four different meanings. To an ordinary 
English-speaking white man, casually dropping in on the 
group, the language would sound less intelligible than Chinese. 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


It happens that there is an English-speaking white man in 
the party—and he is quite out of the ordinary. As a matter 
of fact, he is little more than a boy. He is the only member 
of his race, except local trappers and such folk, who has ever 
enjoyed the hospitality of these uncouth aborigines and has 
come back to tell about it. 

His hosts are not entertaining him, and he sits cross-legged 
on the ground in a corner. Huddled there in the shadow, with 
white face and slight figure, he is alien to the goings-on in 
the center of the room. 

He watches the men place and withdraw and replace certain 
sticks on a crazy pattern scraped into the ground around which 
they are grouped. Furs and other personal property from 
time to time change hands. To be sure, the back-room atmos¬ 
phere of a cigar store is missing; so are the chewed cigars and 
the red and blue chips. But this strange performance in the 
depths of a desolate northern wilderness is nothing more 
nor less than a poker game. The players are Athabascan 
Indians. It isn’t an all-night game, because it is transpiring 
north of the Arctic Circle, where night comes once every twelve 
months and outsits any poker game that ever lured mortal man. 

About a week, as the white man reckons such matters, after 
the poker game, the splintered moonlight throwing its beams 
over the Great Bear Lake looks down on another spectacle. 

The white youth’s hand guides an ax. He is alone—unseen, 
unheard by the villagers. Against the walls of the frozen 
sky the crunch of his digging rebounds. But he has taken care 


38 



A YANKEE VISITS OUR FIRST PEOPLE 


to be out of hearing of the Indians. For he is exploring an 
aboriginal grave in the pursuit of his scientific research. 

He had been lucky, so far. He had intruded alone upon 
the primeval privacy of the Hareskin Indians, about whom 
little more than their name was known to the outside world. 
He was the third white man from civilization who had at¬ 
tempted this, and the first scientist. The other two were mis¬ 
sionaries; they had come, not to study these people, nor to 
take anything from them, but to teach them and help them. 
The presence of the priests had been resented; their bodies were 
customs, to learn their legends. 

And then this youth had come—fifteen years later—to 
thrust himself into the midst of these unknown Indians— 
into their homes, their councils, their work and love and play, 
and their death. He had come to record their language, to 
study their skins, to inspect their skeletons, to scrutinize their 
customs, to learn their legends. 

The youth was Cornelius Osgood. Twenty-three years old 
and an anthropology student—later an instructor at Yale Uni¬ 
versity—he had undertaken this adventure for the National 
Museum of Canada. He had already seen something of the 
world, having traveled about 100,000 miles before he set out, 
in May, 1928, to live among this “key” tribe of American 
Indians, which covers more ground and is less understood than 
any other tribe still extant. The primitive Hareskins, number¬ 
ing at present about 1,000 persons, are an important branch of 
the Athabascans who are spread over all of far northern Canada. 

39 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


These Athabascans’ ancestors are believed to have come from 
Asia over the Behring Strait, and are generally considered the 
earliest Indians inhabiting the North American Continent. 
Various branches of the great tribe are rapidly losing their 
identity and vigor along the Pacific coast in the United States. 
These representatives of the family are modernized and have 
been exhaustively studied. 

But this northernmost branch was practically unknown pre¬ 
vious to Osgood’s fifteen months’ research among them. And 
since the Hareskins had carried on their Arctic existence with 
almost no outside contacts, the characteristics of the first 
Athabascans—probably the first American Indians—are better 
preserved in this one sparse people than anywhere else. 

The home of the Hareskins is in the vicinity of the Great 
Bear Lake, which straddles the Arctic Circle in northwest 
Canada—one of the most desolate regions on the North 
American Continent. 

Osgood’s equipment, when he left Chicago with the Great 
Bear Lake territory as his destination, consisted of two rifles, 
400 rounds of ammunition, two cameras, twenty-four note¬ 
books, fifty recording phonograph disks, an eider-down sleep¬ 
ing bag, and a minimum of personal effects. 

His first stop was Ottawa, the Canadian capital, where he 
received further equipment and information from his sub¬ 
sidizers—the anthropology division of the Canadian Govern¬ 
ment’s Department of Mines. The purpose of his trip was 
broad in its content but specific in its connotation. He was 


40 



A YANKEE VISITS OUR FIRST PEOPLE 


to “reconstruct the ethnology”—the science of the race—“of 
the northern Athabascan Indians.” 

Having piled up about 4,000 miles of travel since his de¬ 
parture, a thousand of them without guide or companion, 
Osgood reached Great Bear Lake, the base of his operations, 
early in the summer. The last segment of his railroad journey 
took him to the town of Waterways, and for a year his mode 
of travel was confined to foot, canoe, and dog sled. The lake 
is about the size of Lake Huron, but its remoteness has made 
it little more than a name to the civilized world. 

Six months after he had last been seen, a letter from Osgood 
reached Chicago, establishing the fact that he was still alive. 
The letter, written from “The Fishery, Great Bear Lake,” in 
January, was received about the middle of April. 

“Bear Lake is my vantage spot,” the communication read. 
“It is the battle-ground of the Northern Dene (the Athabas¬ 
cans), a desirable location which holds the one sure supply 
of fish; and fish are, and probably always have been, the 
chief food supply. Around a little space of land near the 
end of the north shore of Keith Bay gather the families of 
Dogribs, the Satuden, Katcodene, and sub-group Indians. It 
is from this place, known as the Fishery, that nearly all the 
trails and trap-lines for a hundred miles around have their 
commencement. 

“After making nearly the complete circuit of the lake in 
a small sloop during the summer, I decided to pitch my 
tent at the Fishery. A little later I moved into an eight-by- 


41 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


twelve shack which, before it served me, was first a dog house 
and then a fish cache. By means of the removal of half a 
ton of boulders I lowered the floor about a foot, so that I could 
stand up. I enjoy my home, and when I see it in the distance 
as I come from a hard trip, I am willing to swear there was 
never a better.” 

Osgood found his vast laboratory populated by specimens 
“as deceitful, uncommunicative, and ungrateful, as a group, as 
any people I have so far been stimulated to imagine.” 

The problems he faced grew with each new day. The 
colossal barrier of the tribe’s menacing attitude toward the white 
man who wanted to live among them was only one source of 
discouragement. An epidemic the preceding summer—an 
epidemic that the Indians would not or could not explain— 
had wiped out most of the old men and women, and the 
younger generation of natives stared glassily at the white youth 
when he tried to stir up their memories. 

He would take his dogs and go off in search of old burials, 
or for the indelible traces of stone axes on ancient stumps. As 
summer drew on, the shore opened up and revealed old canoes, 
and drift objects of wood and bark. It was his job, with such 
odds and ends and smatterings of evidence almost tom from 
the Indians, to reconstruct a whole social order. 

Osgood tried in every possible way to build up confidence. 
He had long evening sessions with the Indians. When they 
were tired and surfeited with food, he endeavored to give the 
leads that would start the stolid Hareskins on tales of their 


42 



A YANKEE VISITS OUR FIRST PEOPLE 


native folklore. But the winter was long and results were 
short. Nevertheless, a beginning was made. 

When spring came, he found himself starting life again 
with the natives. After the experiences of the dreary winter, 
the memory of civilization waned. But he stuck doggedly 
to his work. He remained at Great Bear Lake through the 
summer of 1929, and in September of that year he was back 
in Chicago with the results of the year of study. 

The Hareskins are dying. Within the last half century 
many have scattered and intermarried, and the tribe has de¬ 
creased to an extent that presages the imminent extinction of 
this lingering vestige of America’s first people. 

Osgood brought back a fascinating story, patiently pieced 
together, of this vanishing people—their life, religion, work, 
play, strife, social standards—their physical measurements, 
their archaeology. Three hundred photographs, which he 
secured, form a unique contribution to the study of man by 
man, as do his fifty phonograph records of songs—ceremonial, 
gambling, love songs. With the aid of his friend and guide, 
who came up to his frozen camp and acted as interpreter and 
tutor, he learned the Hareskin language, which, like so many 
phenomena that antedate modem man, is inexplicably baffling. 

Thus, amid freezing gales, a youth pursues a retreating race, 
that it may give up its secrets before it has disappeared for¬ 
ever. Beyond the farthest tip of civilization’s reach, science 
finds an epoch and an epic; and a new chapter is added to the 
story of man. 


43 



Chapter II 


THE FIRST SCIENTIST 

T HE complaint sometimes heard that the modem physi¬ 
cian is “as independent as a hog on ice” probably ema¬ 
nates from the time, some thirty centuries before the birth of 
Christ, when the first surgeon of whom we have record reso¬ 
lutely divided his diagnoses into three categories: (1) an ail¬ 
ment which I will treat; (2) an ailment I will contend with; 
(3 ) an ailment not to be treated. 

This intelligible, if arbitrary, stand is recorded, along with 
the experiments of the Egyptian medico, on a rolled papyrus 
fifteen feet in length. It is the oldest medical book in the world, 
as well as the earliest repudiation of quackery in human his¬ 
tory. Previous to the work of this anonymous scientist the 
street-corner faker thrived in unmolested bliss, busily selling 
incantations against the demons who allegedly afflicted healthy 
citizens and transformed them overnight into the lame, the 
halt, and the blind. 

It had evidently been the intention of our first surgeon to 
present a medical survey of the human body, beginning at the 
head and going on down to the feet. But, unfortunately, his 
discussion of the ills that flesh is heir to did not extend 


44 


THE FIRST SCIENTIST 


beyond the thorax and the top of the spine. Evidently he 
was rudely interrupted; for his dissertation, which is the most 
important scientific document surviving from the pre-Greek 
age, ends in the middle of a case, the middle of a line, and 
the middle of a sentence. 

The aborted papyrus, recently translated from its hiero¬ 
glyphics into English by the noted Egyptologist, Professor 
James Henry Breasted, remains, in spite of its fragmentary 
character, a milestone in the history of the development of 
medicine. It records the awakening of man to the connection 
between diseases and their natural, environmental causes. 

Aside from this fundamental recognition, our Egyptian sur¬ 
geon possessed a remarkable understanding of human anatomy 
—far superior to that of the medical students of the Middle 
Ages. His diagnoses reveal his belief that the heart and the 
brain are “key” organs in our physical make-up. He evidences 
knowledge of the circulatory system and the pulse, as well as 
a comprehexision of bone structure—of fractures and their treat¬ 
ment. Although no knowledge of the nervous system appears 
to have been developed in this period, the prevalence of paraly¬ 
sis and the primitive treatment for it are indicated in pre- 
biblical phraseology. 

The surgical student for whom the book apparently was 
intended is given “instructions in regard to treatment of the 
perforation of the temporal bone.” (The temporal bone con¬ 
tains the organ of hearing in mammals and is situated in the 
side of the head.) We read: 


45 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


If thou findest that man to be silent and he does not speak, 
thou shouldst soften his head with grease; pour (an unidenti¬ 
fied medicant) into his ears. He may put his hand to his 
eyes but not realize that he is doing it. 

The test for paralysis strikes us as a simpler and more effec¬ 
tive procedure: 

Tell thy patient to look over his right and over his left 
shoulder and at his breast, if he is able to do so. 

To be sure, Professor Breasted points out that this first 
scientific physician had not entirely escaped the current super¬ 
stitions of his age. In the instance of a case lying between the 
categories of “ailments I will contend with” and “ailments not 
to be treated,” the surgeon recommends the application of a 
magical formula. This extra-surgical treatment is invoked in 
the case of a compound, crushed fracture of the frontal, or 
forehead, bone. 

Fifty-six physical examinations are recorded in the papyrus, 
most of them dealing with sword-cuts in the skull and with 
injuries sustained in the erection of the great temples and 
monuments that gave ancient Egypt its preeminence in archi¬ 
tecture. Since most of these injuries were caused by tangible 
physical agencies, with attendant tangible pain, they were not 
to be attributed to malignant spirits whose expulsion could be 
effected by magic. 

Our Egyptian surgeon not only scoffs at the notion of illness 
caused by non-natural forces, but he adopts a scientific ap¬ 
proach that was extraordinary for his era. He will not sug- 
46 



THE FIRST SCIENTIST 


gcst treatment for sixteen of the fifty-six cases he discusses; 
in fact, he includes twelve of these sixteen cases in the category 
of “ailments not to be treated.” In other words, he frankly 
admits his ignorance of the proper procedure. 

The author begins with simple cases of skin fractures and 
superficial injuries; then he proceeds to surgical problems of 
increasing gravity and complexity. The first case he describes 
involves a scalp wound. Case No. 2 is a severe cut that does 
not injure the bone. The third patient, and those following, 
are victims of injuries that affect the skull. The fourth case, 
for example, is a compound fracture; the fifth is a compound, 
comminuted—or pulverized—fracture; and the sixth is a com¬ 
pound, comminuted fracture in which the membranes encas¬ 
ing the brain are ruptured. 

For the first time in the history of medicine this papyrus 
records the application of surgical bandages and the use of anti¬ 
septic measures. There is mention of cauterization, of lint 
manufactured from vegetable tissue and used externally and 
as an absorptive, of linen bandages, adhesive plaster (two pieces 
of which were always applied transversely), and of supports 
designed to keep the patient upright in bed. 

Probing the wound is recommended, with the suggestion that 
the fingers or a swab of linen be used in the process. Surgical 
stitching also is discussed, as well as the possibility of setting 
dislocated bones through experimental probing. 

There is a reasonable likelihood that the payrus was used 
as a text-book as recently as the sixth century before Christ, 


47 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


when Uzahor-resenet, a high priest in the temple of a goddess 
in the Nile Delta city of Sais, restored the first medical school 
in the world—the “Hall of the House of Life”—under the 
patronage of King Darius I of Persia, whom Professor Breasted 
describes as “the greatest and most enlightened administrator 
of the early world before the rise of the Romans.” 

An inscription from the statue of Uzahor-resenet, now in the 
Vatican Museum in Rome, reads: 

“His Majesty, King Darius, commanded me to come to 
Egypt while His Majesty was in Elam as Great King of every 
country and Chief Prince of Egypt, in order to establish the 
Hall of the House of Life. 

“I did as His Majesty commanded me. 1 equipped them 
with all their students from among men of consequence. No 
sons of the poor were among them. I placed them under the 
hand of every wise man for all their work . I equipped them 
with all their needs, with all their instruments, which were in 
the writing, according to what was in them aforetime. 

“His Majesty did this because he knew the value of this 
art in order to save the life of everyone having sickness.” 

“In this remarkable inscription,” writes Professor Breasted, 
in his introduction to the translation of the papyrus, “we find 
the earliest known mention of a medical school as a royal foun¬ 
dation. It is important to note that this Egyptian medical 
school at Sais was not being founded for the first time, but was 
being restored, as the surviving old writings in Uzahor-resenet’s 
hands showed him it had been ‘aforetime/ 


48 



THE FIRST SCIENTIST 


“We note with interest that the medical students of the 
sixth century B. C. in Egypt were selected from families of 
good social station, and that, as the last lines show, these young 
physicians were evidently also priests in the temple of the 
Goddess. (The Goddess Neith, at whose temple Uzahor- 
resenet was a priest.) Indeed, the High Priest himself, Uzahor- 
resenet, bore the title ‘Chief Physician.’ Among the branches 
of instruction, the reference to ‘instruments’ shows us that sur¬ 
gery was included. 

“Among these highly civilized cities of the Nile Delta, the 
first large cities the Greeks had ever seen, the Macedonian kings 
of Egypt set up their enlightened scientific foundations at Alex¬ 
andria. We see now that in medicine at least Darius antici¬ 
pated them. The important point to note is the fact that the 
support of old Egyptian medical instruction was continued 
by the Persians after their conquest of Egypt (525 B. c.). 

“When, two centuries later, the Alexandrian physicians be¬ 
gan to enjoy the princely support of the Ptolemies, they found 
themselves among the surviving native Egyptian medical schools 
and medical libraries of the Delta, when such contacts and 
influences as we have suggested could hardly have been es¬ 
caped.” 

The vicissitudes to which the roll had been subjected, together * 
with the wear and tear of daily perusal, have frayed the outer¬ 
most flap, upon which the writing began. As a result, the name 
of the book, the name of its pioneering author (if it was there), 
and the opening discussion of the first case were lost. 


49 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


The precise beginning of science, like the precise beginning 
of life, is unknown and perhaps unknowable. Physical as well 
as spiritual evolution has covered up its trail like a fugitive. 
The hieroglyphics of five thousand years ago are, on infinity’s 
date-book, only a few hours old. Some day the man who in¬ 
scribed the hieroglyphics and the man who translated them 
may be classed as practically contemporaries. 

In the meantime, there has been restored to mankind the work 
of the first of those daring scientists who, defying superstition 
and crusted tradition, blazed the trail which unborn genera¬ 
tions were to follow. 


50 



Chapter III 


AMERICANS SPEAK AMERICAN 

I F YOU talk in the vernacular of the United States, you 
do not speak English, according to the man who has been 
called “the greatest living dictionary maker” You speak 
American, a language that is indigenously and inalienably 
yours, that was born on the day the Pilgrim Fathers set foot 
on American soil at Plymouth in 1620. On that day, the 
hardy pioneers drew lots for the division of land. Each man’s 
portion of ground came to be referred to as his “lot.” To¬ 
day a piece of ground in America is known as a lot. But 
in England—and in English—the word lot has never meant 
anything but “share.” 

Sir William A. Craigie, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Ox¬ 
ford, Professor of Lexicography at the University of Chicago, 
and, most recently, Knight of the British Empire, has been 
in Chicago for the last five years, engaged in compiling An 
Historical Dictionary of American English. Besides record¬ 
ing the meaning and background of all imported words, his 
monumental work is to include the history of every expression 
that is truly American, from its origin as early as the seven¬ 
teenth century down to the present day. 


51 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


This diminutive, gray-bearded Scot, who just before his de¬ 
parture for the United States had completed thirty years’ work 
as editor of the S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z sections of 
the ten-volume Oxford English Dictionary, is now devoting 
his genius to the study of a phenomenon that the American 
lexicographers, such as Webster and his successors, deprecated 
and evaded. He is going to present America with a dictionary 
of its own language, representing a compendium of the evolu¬ 
tion and meaning of those distinctively American words that 
have caused modem scholars to recognize the idiom of the 
United States as a separate and individual tongue, no longer 
the same as English. 

The famous dictionary maker has come to the rescue of 
our much-maligned American slang. He declares that the 
“man in the street” is enabled, by its use, to express himself 
more pointedly and forcefully in thousands of situations than 
would otherwise be possible. 

“Consider, for instance,” he says, “the phrase, ‘It’s up to you.’ 
There is no other group of English words to convey so con¬ 
cisely this exact shade of meaning. Slang expressions of this 
kind are destined to be permanent additions to the American 
language, and obviously must be included in our Dictionary 
of American English” 

Slang is often carried to excess, Professor Craigie admits; 
but it is plain that the real test of slang lies in that determinant 
which is the real test of any human tool, mental or physical— 
its utility. If a slang word or phrase fills a long-felt want and 



AMERICANS SPEAK AMERICAN 


is generally adopted throughout the country, it will take its 
rightful place in the language. 

But the American Dictionary is not to be a hodge-podge 
collection of slang, in spite of the attention that will be de¬ 
manded by such Americanisms as bunk, small potatoes, boss, 
simoleon, square meal, and tight place. 

It has two other primary functions, both of which surpass 
in importance the systematized compilation of “vulgar” speech. 
In the first place it will trace, through the delineation of each 
word and phrase that made its first recorded appearance in 
America, the history of the nation itself. The hundreds of 
persons who are now voluntarily culling newspapers, hand-bills, 
circus-posters, war orders, personal letters, bills of sale, inven¬ 
tories, and the more literary records of our native speech, are 
charged with furnishing the history of each Americanism, 
showing the locale of its origin and the diffusion of its popular 
use. 

The second purpose of Professor Craigie’s lexicon will 
correct the error of former American dictionary makers who 
attributed distinctly American creations to the English authors 
by whom they were later adopted. 

Such an authority as Webster not only failed to present a 
complete picture of the American language at the time, but 
ignored many perfectly acceptable native expressions simply 
because they did not have an English background. Webster 
attributed the word fall, meaning autumn, to English sources, 
although the word had survived only as a part of American 

53 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


speech. Again, he sweepingly omitted from consideration 
words like prairie , in his first work, although that word had 
appeared in the title of a novel by James Fenimore Cooper. 

Webster, completing his dictionary in 1828, regarded the 
language of the United States as the language of England; 
he ignored, without a qualm, such pure Americanisms as 
pale-face, pecan, platform (in its political use), pone, pow¬ 
wow, and punk (touchwood). 

The rigors and novelties of the new country profoundly 
influenced the spoken language of America early in colonial 
history, inspiring all sorts of new locutions. Elements both 
physical and mental appeared on this side of the Atlantic that 
were unknown in Great Britain. Life began here again under 
new conditions. 

Before the white man had fully explored the reaches of his 
recently acquired home in the Western Hemisphere he had 
fathered the beginnings of the American language in a large 
aggregation of expressions which he had coined from the 
immediate expression of novel situations and from his efforts 
to reach a verbal understanding with neighbors from other 
nations of the Old World. 

Among the earliest Americanisms are blizzard, camp¬ 
meeting, cave in, kick (in the sense of “object”), take back 
(a statement), stump (as an informal platform for a political 
speaker), backwoods, bee-line, bluff, clearing, diggings, Indian 
file, log-rolling, to tree (in the sense of cutting off escape), 
gouge, bundle, boost, prospect, swap, bogus, and spook- 


54 



AMERICANS SPEAK AMERICAN 


In a letter written on April 2, 1775, George Washington 
used the compound word back-country, an expression never 
found in England and one which rapidly intrenched itself in 
the body of the national speech. At about Washington’s 
time, too, Americans assigned the word corn to the plant and 
its fruit, known for centuries in the mother country by no 
other term than maize. Corn, in England, has always referred 
to grain in general; or, in some cases to wheat, oats, or barley. 
But never does it connote maize to the Britisher. 

The lore of early America, in all its quaint and odd aspects, 
is pouring into the office in which the lexicographer sits study¬ 
ing the raw material out of which his great work is to be shaped. 

Bunk —one of the most forceful and expressive expletives in 
the national vocabulary, is not only pure American, but is trace¬ 
able in its origin to the legislative halls of the country. Col. 
Edward Buncombe, a Southern congressman, addressing his 
fellow legislators on one occasion in 1827, began to reel off 
an interminable declamation on a subject that was extraneous 
to the business before the session. Agonized cries of “Down 
with Buncombe!” eventually convinced the gentleman of the 
advisability of concluding his oration. But whenever, there¬ 
after, an honorable representative appeared to be heading off 
on a long-winded or irrelevant tack, there were mumblings of 
“Buncombe.” This gave way to the throatier roll of bunkum, 
and eventually to bunk . 

But why should an Englishman be called to this country to 
compile a dictionary of the American language? What back- 

55 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


ground, one might ask, has he in American life, in “English 
as she is spoke” on this side of the Atlantic? 

Professor Craigie’s qualification for the undertaking is 
paradoxical, and yet it is entirely congruous with the demands 
of the enterprise. Americans, he points out, refuse to admit 
the drifting apart of the English and the American languages, 
but the separation has long been patent to the Britisher, who 
has learned that when he crosses the big water he must go 
so many blocks from one place to another, rather than 
turnings, that he must order dessert when he wishes a sweet, 
that a bowler is a derby, that the bug of his homeland is the 
objectionable bedbug in the United States, and that insects 
pervade the American landscape under the general denomina¬ 
tion of bugs . 

After the Civil War, Englishmen were puzzled by strange 
words in news dispatches from the United States. They began 
to read of carpet-bagger, caucus, electioneering, governmental, 
on the fence, indignation meeting, lynch law, wire-pulling, 
almighty dollar, colored people, Uncle Sam, run (a candi¬ 
date), stump (the country), and so on. What language was 
this? 

Especially curious, in the light of the American’s reputation 
for efficiency and businesslike methods, is the tendency to de¬ 
velop more elaborate words in place of the brittle English 
equivalents. Instances of this kind are the American elevator 
for lift, automobile for motor car, gasoline for petrol, and 
locomotive for engine. 


56 



AMERICANS SPEAK AMERICAN 


These and a large percentage of intrinsically American 
expressions are easily traceable to their sources. But many 
of the words that will be discussed in the forthcoming dic¬ 
tionary are riddles, their origins being lost in the mists of 
history and legend. 

Notable among these is Yankee , the origin of which has 
been heatedly disputed for two centuries without any final 
settlement. Its use is clearly established from 1765 onward. 
Another word which has a very definite start, so far as the 
printed record is concerned, is bogus, appearing first in the 
Painesville (Ohio) Telegraph of July 6, 1827, and there used 
as the name of a machine that produced counterfeit coins. 

To the influence of such American groups as the Dutch are 
attributed the origins of several everyday words, including 
boss (from the Dutch baas) adopted in New York in 1806, 
and spook, in 1801. 

Rowdy turns up a little later, and the earliest evidence (1819) 
identifies rowdies with backwoodsmen, and speaks of “the 
hunters, or Illinois Rowdies, as they are called.” Dander, 
in such phrases as “to get one’s dander up,” is in common use 
from about 1835, while cocktail has been traced back to 1806, 
when it was described as “a stimulating liquor, vulgarly called 
bitter sling.” 

The fate of such innovations has been varied. Some have 
been short-lived and some have never risen above the level of 
vulgarisms, while others have made their way not only into 
standard American but into English speech as well. 


57 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


“The search for early instances of such words and phrases 
is usually an interesting one,” we are told by Professor Craigie, 
“because the types of literature in which they occur are truly 
American in character, and frequently of an entertaining 
nature. There is more to be learned about the history of 
American speech from a close study of NeaPs Brother Jonathan 
or Paulding’s John Bull in America than from the more solid 
and solemn works of their contemporaries.” 

In other words, most of our sturdiest idioms were first 
recorded in the informal publications that flourished as freely 
as they do now. The following are a few examples of newly- 
invented words that first found printed expression in the 
popular literature of their generation: 

Ahead of (in figurative sense), 1825. 

Allow (admit), 1843. 

Anxious seat (in religious use), 1888. 

At that (in such phrases as “and slow at that”), 1830. 

Awful (“an awful bother”), 1814. 

Back number (figurative), 1810. 

Back seat (in “to take a back seat”), 1863. 

Bark up the wrong tree, 1833. 

Big bug, 1831. 

Blowout (feast), 1825. 

Boss (as a verb), 1856. 

Britisher, 1829. 

Bully (excellent, capital), 1855. 

Bury the hatchet, 1824. 


58 



AMERICANS SPEAK AMERICAN 


Bust (burst), 1850. 

Take the cake, 1886. 

Calculate (think, believe), 1812. 

Carry on (frolic, riot), 1834. 

Catch on, 1884. 

Caution (“a caution”), 1834. 

Chalk (“to walk the chalk-mark”), 1835. 

Chore, 1820. 

Clear out (leave), 1824. 

Completion of the letter S section of the Oxford English 
Dictionary required ten years of intensive work. This will 
not, of course, be the length of time required for work under 
the letter S in the American Dictionary, since the scope of 
the latter covers only a mere three centuries. 

But Professor Craigie does not venture to estimate the date 
when the present formidable undertaking will be completed. 
In the prosecution of his immense task, he has issued a call for 
cooperation on the part of many Americans. He himself, 
seated in his quiet little office, is diligently organizing the vast 
stores of material that he is thus accumulating. 

It’s an awful job—no bunk about that. 


59 



Chapter IV 


BALLY-HOO AMONG THE ANCIENTS 

T HE digger into ancient civilizations is a genial, tolerant 
fellow under ordinary conditions. But when he comes 
across an Assyrian ruler of 700 B. c. who roller-coasted into 
the office of Head Man of the then known universe by means 
of much the same publicity stunts that politicians today employ, 
he is likely to become even more tolerant toward his twentieth 
century compatriots. 

Sargon II usurped the throne of Assyria many centuries 
ago—to be exact, a matter of 721 years before the birth of 
Christ. There is only one fact that identifies him as a usurper, 
but that fact is conclusive: He boasts of everything but his 
ancestors. His predecessors and successors vaunted every factor 
in their own make-up, disposition, and achievements; but more 
brazenly than anything else, they memorialized their royal line. 

According to Professor Edward Chiera, who led an arch¬ 
aeological expedition into Assyria to dig into the ancient 
tyrant’s great palace, Sargon II took the name of a powerful 
ruler of earlier times—Sargon I—when he acceded to the throne 
of the empire, but he studiously avoided allusion to his pro¬ 
genitors as long as he lived. 


60 


BALLY-HOO AMONG THE ANCIENTS 


The second Sargon, in fact, did not live unduly long; he 
met his death in a minor skirmish in the mountains near 
Khorsabad, after a reign of seventeen war-torn years. But 
while he lived he fought and conquered every nation of sufficient 
size to threaten any segment of his domain. The tribes— 
including the Hebrews of Palestine—that fell before his relent¬ 
less lust for power were made tributary to him, and thousands 
of their members were taken prisoners of war and reduced to 

When Sargon II looked around the horizon, as Alexander 
the Great was to do four centuries later, and found no more 
worlds to conquer, he sat with his head in his hands, pondering 
new schemes for immortalizing his name and his prowess. 
Warfare had yielded him its richest fruits. What should he 
do with his myriad slaves? What should he do with his time? 

“I have it!” Sargon II must have exclaimed to himself, his 
eyes shining with joy. ‘Til kill two birds with one stone; Fll 
build a palace that will make history’s eyes pop. It will be 
the biggest and most beautiful palace ever built. My 27,000 
Hebrew prisoners of war will do the work; it will keep them 
out of mischief. To be sure, my little project will cost the 
state a tidy sum, but it will relieve the unemployment situation, 
and the name of Sargon II will endure forever.” 

Sargon set out at once to realize his ambition. His palace 
became the grandest memorial that had ever been erected to 
god or man. Solomon’s temple could have been moved about 
in its courtyard. The doors of the palace were guarded by ten 


61 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


stone bulls, the four largest of which weighed forty tons each. 
The walls and ceilings of the structure were embellished with 
six thousand square yards of frieze work and carving, nearly 
all of it depicting the intelligence and benevolence of the 
emperor. 

Many of the friezes are still intact. They depict docile 
emissaries coming from Palestine and Syria, from all the 
inconsequential kingdoms between the Persian Gulf and 
Kurdistan, from the realms of Asia Minor and Egypt—all of 
them bearing conciliatory gifts of horses, thrones, statues, and 
money. The king’s personal valor and military genius are 
eulogized from one end of the palace to the other, and all 
men are advised of the terror and splendor of this monarch’s 
name, and of the wisdom of the gods who chose him to rule 
the world. 

Palace of Sargon, the Great King, King of the Universe, 
King of Assyria, Viceroy of Babylon, King of Sumer and 
Akkad, King of the Four Regions of the World, Favorite of 
the Great Gods. Assur, Nabu, and Marduk Have Intrusted 
to Me an Unrivaled Kingdom and Have Caused My Gracious 
Name to Attain Unto the Highest Renown. I Bring Great 
Good to the Cities. 1 Have Delivered the People from 
Taxation. 

This audacious self-eulogy, with variations, appears at least 
once in every chamber of the palace. Was it purposeful beyond 
sheer boasting? At any rate, the Orientalists say that it was 
100 per cent effective propaganda. 


62 



BALLY-HOO AMONG THE ANCIENTS 


Statistics, enumerating the enemies killed, wounded, and 
captured, obviously in excess of any ancient army’s voracious¬ 
ness, screamed from the walls of magnificent reception halls 
in which, it is likely, indignant representatives of tributary 
nations awaited admission to the throne-room for an audience 
with Sargon regarding the burdens of taxation imposed on 
their people. 

While Sargon lay dozing amid his purple and gold these 
emissaries found plenty of opportunity to acquaint themselves 
with the fates of other nations, whose complaints were silenced 
by the “divine infallibility” of the Emperor’s swordsmen. 
Somewhat chastened, they were ushered into the royal presence, 
where they announced that they had come to advise the King 
of his just and generous attitude toward his vassals, and to 
announce the preparation of a priceless gift, for which each 
and every citizen had considered it a privilege to contribute 
a tithe of his wealth. In this fashion the war-weary ruler 
spread smoldering peace and groaning culture throughout his 
realm. 

It may seem, then, that the massive temple erected by the 
Emperor in eulogy of the Emperor was simply a matter of 
national diplomacy. But recent discovery refutes that suppo¬ 
sition and indicts Sargon II as the most pompous blowhard 
that the world has ever known. 

Inscriptions describing the monarch’s prowess and benignity 
were discovered by Professor Chiera on the backs of slabs, 
where they could not be seen until the walls crumbled to ruin 


63 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


and every side of each stone could be exposed. Besides these, 
he recovered boxes, such as are sealed in the corner-stones of 
modem structures, imbedded five feet deep in the masonry of 
the palace, crammed with plaques of bronze, silver, and gold, 
all proclaiming the glory that was Sargon’s. 

Here was a man who felt the pressure of the future, who 
tried to reach ahead of time and life. He was taking no 
chances with legend’s uncertain perpetuity or with carved 
inscriptions exposed to the elements. He had his ineffable 
virtues recorded and put away in safety-deposit boxes for the 
wonder and enlightenment of curious minds twenty-seven 
hundred years later. 

So the name of Sargon II did not perish, though his body, 
which was mortal, did. He was killed in 704 B. c., not in one 
of the epochal battles that elevated him to a position among 
the world’s greatest military leaders, but—as we have seen— 
in a distinctly minor skirmish almost within sight of his 
unfinished palace at Khorsabad. 

The report of a small mutiny under way in the mountains 
outside the city awoke the battle-lust of the autocrat, and he 
elected to try his hand again at the pastime that had made him 
Emperor of the earth. But the relaxation born of worldly 
success had taken its toll, as it usually does in the case of 
those who have lived active lives. Thus the man who had 
dazzled his generation was ingloriously shuffled off the terres¬ 
trial scene. 

The palace of Sargon II was never completed. His son, 


64 



BALLY-HOO AMONG THE ANCIENTS 

Sennacherib, had plans of his own for a cozy little place. 
Moreover, he and his father had never hit it off as well as 
fathers and sons should. Sennacherib perhaps thought that it 
would be a delightful joke on the old gentleman if his dream 
castle was deserted and left as a wind-swept sanctuary for 
homeless animals. 

An added incentive to this decision was probably the 
insufficiency of blank wall space for laudatory inscriptions of 
the incomparable wisdom and munificence of the new ruler. 
At any rate, Sennacherib packed up his laundry, gathered 
together his slaves, and moved to a choice subdivision ten 
miles away. There, on a site close to the Tigris River, he 
had plenty of elbow-room for demonstrating his own technique 
in palace building. 

In the spring of 1929, while engaged in excavating 125 tons 
of relief carvings from the palace of Sargon, the Chiera expe¬ 
dition stumbled upon young Sennacherib’s structure. Although 
the excavation of the junior ruler’s palace cannot be effected 
for many years Professor Chiera and his associates know that 
the story of Sennacherib’s construction project will, in many 
respects, rival that of his father’s achievement. 

According to Old Testament records, Sennacherib was the 
more distinguished of the two men. But they surely had much 
in common. An inscription has already been recovered that 
indicates a propensity to self-adulation which in its matchless 
egotism suggests a direct inheritance from the father. 

Included in the collection from Sargon’s palace which was 


65 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


sent to America are all the fragments of frieze work that 
covered a corridor one hundred feet long. Three of the 
colossal slabs depict foreign emissaries appearing before Sargon 
laden with gifts. There are figures of horses and men from 
the courtyard walls, and a heroic-sized carving of Sargon him¬ 
self, accompanied by his prime minister. One of the forty-ton 
bulls, when the pieces are assembled, is eighteen feet high and 
seventeen feet long. 

The activities of the excavators were confined largely to the 
palace courtyard, the edifice itself being reserved for future 
work by the expedition. Between the palace of Sargon and that 
of Sennacherib lies a walled city, still untouched. It is believed 
that the Assyrian plain covers hundreds of town-sites of that 
era. The expedition was housed directly above the royal 
quarters of Sargon, near the present city of Khorsabad. 
Professor Chiera made overtures for the purchase of the site, 
in order to raze it for the furtherance of his excavation plans. 

Naturally, the expedition encountered almost insuperable 
difficulties in crating and moving the immense fragments of 
the great stone carvings. Sections of the colossal bull weighed 
as much as twenty tons. The priceless sculptures were trans¬ 
ported on motor trucks across the waste-lands to the Tigris. 

After the prizes had been safely landed in America the 
expedition again set out for the Far East, early in 1931, to 
resume work on these two rulers of twenty-five hundred years 
ago whose capacity for slipping a “fast one” over on the 
gullible public has yet to be surpassed by modern politicians. 


66 



Chapter V 


BEATING THE LAW IN BABYLONIA 

I N THE course of an achaeological expedition carried on 
jointly by Harvard University and the University of 
Pennsylvania a number of clay tablets have been uncovered 
in ancient Near Eastern ruins baring the business transactions 
of the first shyster lawyers ever known. 

The inscriptions, baked into the clay, indicate that modern 
specialists in sharp practice have scarcely advanced beyond 
their colleagues who flourished 3,000 years before Christ. 

In the ancient city of Nuzi, in Mesopotamia, which the expe¬ 
dition dug up in job lots, it was against the law to sell land. 
The date of this blow to the real estate busines was 1500 B. C. 
The law-givers decreed that land might be transferred from 
one relative to another, but that it must not leave the hands 
of the original owner’s family. 

This apparently unreasonable statute had its justification 
in the fact that Nuzi was a pugnacious community whose gentry 
were conscripted for military purposes at frequent intervals; 
and, since the army was raised from among the landowners 
who were bound to do yeoman service under the Nuzian flag, 
it was a matter of imperial policy to prevent one citizen from 


67 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


owning too many tracts of land, because such a condition would 
appreciably reduce the army eligibility list. 

The good people of Nuzi were not slackers; nevertheless, 
they had a penchant for dabbling in real estate, and were 
determined to carry on traffic in land in spite of the law. 

Here was soil for the roots of the shyster, and he flourished. 
One particularly tricky barrister—unidentified here and for¬ 
ever—opened the way. He suggested that the prospective 
customer get himself legally adopted by the prospective seller. 

The rest was easy. The newly acquired son received the tract 
of land he wanted, as a token of “father’s” filial affection. The 
“son,” in turn (he was frequently older than his fictitious 
father), presented his “dad” with a handsome cash present in 
honor of his birthday or of some national holiday. Within 
half an hour of the consummation of the transaction, the 
adoption was informally annulled, to the mutual satisfaction 
of both parties. 

The plan was so air-tight that it was adopted widely and 
effectively, bringing prosperity and prestige to the legal trick¬ 
ster who conceived the coup. 

Two hundred years previous to this particular piece of legal 
legerdemain, the Babylonians were having trouble with con¬ 
tracts for home-sites. A Babylonian, whom we may call the 
party of the first part, would negotiate a piece of land, improved 
or otherwise, into the possession of a brother-Babylonian (the 
party of the second part), extracting, in accordance with the 
recognized theory of marketing, as healthy a profit as possible. 


68 



BEATING THE LAW IN BABYLONIA 


About a week later, the party of the first part would ap¬ 
pear on the premises involved in the transaction, and take 
said premises away from the duly installed owner. This little 
business was accomplished boldly on the basis of the “might 
is right” theory. However, if the injured party of the second 
part had two or three muscular brothers, he dispatched them to 
the residence of the nefarious party of the first part, and a good 
deal of sling-shooting followed. The ultimate disposal of the 
real estate was determined by the superior accuracy and agility 
of one party’s or the other’s representatives. 

The Babylonians—a simple but energetic people in the main 
—regarded such an adjustment of difficulties as “fundamen¬ 
tally sound”—even ethical. For them it was the democratic 
way of life, even if it did sometimes result in the democratic 
way of death. 

One fateful afternoon, however, it occurred to a certain 
king—or to his legal advisers—that a really worth-while 
amount of property could be detached from the simple country 
folk by the employment of a group of thugs called an army. 
The Babylonians, accordingly, were brushed off their property 
without any formalities on the part of these hired highwaymen, 
and retribution by the agency of big brothers was out of the 
question. 

The problem was acute. Craft, clearly, was in order; and 
craft was supplied by Babylonia’s legal wits. 

Why not, some genius of the profession (perhaps the great¬ 
grandfather of the gentleman who conceived the Nuzian adop- 

69 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


tion scheme) suggested to his associates, invoke the curse of 
the gods on any man who overtly violates a contract? The 
three or more wise men of the period, assembled in council, 
conceded that the gods were omnipotent. They might favor 
the king by winking at international manslaughter. But here 
was unrighteousness at its worst and depravity at its deepest, 
in time of domestic peace. 

The curse of the gods in those days made even the boldest 
tremble. It struck swiftly and surely. The plain people knew 
it, and the king knew it. What is more, the plain people knew 
that the king knew. Therefore, the wily suggestion was seized 
upon by the long-suffering Babylonian people. 

The upshot of it was that not long afterwards the following 
blood-curdling warning was broadcast on clay bricks—one of 
those recovered by the Harvard-Pennsylvania expedition—up 
and down the country: 

“Whensoever in later days an agent, a governor, or a pre¬ 
fect, or a superintendent, or an inspector, or any official what¬ 
soever who shall rise up and be set over Bit-Khanbi, shall direct 
his mind to take away these lands or shall lay claim to them, 
or cause a claim to be made to them, or shall take them away, 
or cause them to be taken away, or shall side with evil, and 
shall return these lands to their province, or shall present them 
to a god or to the king, or to any other man, or because of 
the curse shall cause another to remove this memorial-stone 
or shall cast it into a river or put it in a well, or destroy it 
with a stone, or hide it where it cannot be seen—upon that 
70 



BEATING THE LAW IN BABYLONIA 


man may Anu, Enlil, and Nin-Makh, the great gods, look 
with anger, and may they curse him with an evil curse that can¬ 
not be loosened! 

“May Sin, the light of the bright heaven, with leprosy that 
never departs, clothe his whole body, so that he may not be 
clean until the day of his death, but must roam about like a 
wild ass outside the wall of his city! May Gula, the mighty 
physician, the great lady, put a grievous sickness in his body! 
May A dad, the ruler of heaven and earth, overwhelm his 
fields, so that there may spring up abundantly weeds in place 
of green herbs, and thorns in place of grain! May Nabu, the 
exalted minister, appoint him days of scarcity and drought 
as his destiny! His name, his seed, his offspring, his posterity 
—may they be destroyed in the mouth of widespread people!” 

Here, in truth, was “a horse on the king.” The phraseology 
was befuddling, as legal phraseology so ingeniously is to this 
day. But the point was clear. The king was completely boxed 
in, and his own legal talent dared not offer the suggestion that 
he ignore the invocation of the gods, since even the suggestion 
would be sacrilege. 

The king had to dismiss his jolly robbers and content him¬ 
self with the plunder that had already accrued to him. Normal 
conditions soon obtained over the land of Babylonia. For 
the clever lawyer, this time on the side of the downtrodden, had 
ruined—until the advent of modern man—the old-fashioned 
delights of contract-jumping and land-snatching. 


71 



Chapter VI 


A PREHISTORIC GARBAGE HEAP 

E VEN a garbage heap may yield treasure-trove to science. 

Not long ago there was discovered in northern Africa 
the skeletal remains of a 25,000-year-old race of people—a 
strange snail-eating folk—embalmed in their garbage. This 
particular garbage heap has provided anthropology with a 
new chapter in mankind’s history and the most complete frame 
of a prehistoric human being ever discovered. 

Buried under and preserved by a ponderous layer of dis¬ 
carded snail shells five to twelve feet deep, the mound man of 
Mechta-El-Arbie, Algeria, lay in obscure sleep through the 
ages. Now, at the beck of science, he arises to tell us the sort of 
life that he and his relatives lived in those far days. 

Clustered around tribal fires between the Sahara Desert and 
the Mediterranean Sea, these humble ancestors of ours nightly 
munched on the meat scraped from thousands of tiny shells, 
presumably with as keen enjoyment as a modern epicure with 
a bowl of delectable shrimps before him. Occasionally—per¬ 
haps in honor of special guests—the piece de resistance was 
a barbecued human neighbor, for his charred bones have been 
found in the host’s fireplace. 


72 


A PREHISTORIC GARBAGE HEAP 


But week in and week out, the African mound man, a per¬ 
son of simple tastes in the main, ate snails and created his tomb 
that way, instead of digging his grave with his teeth, as his 
descendants are often accused of doing. For five or ten thou¬ 
sand years he blandly disregarded the lack of sanitation and 
plumbing, and lived heartily, if somewhat squalidly, on snails. 

The shells piled up. They took on the proportions of 
hillocks budding over the level countryside. When death— 
possibly the result of acute indigestion—overtook a member 
of the tribe, he was tenderly laid away in a tomb that might 
forever bespeak his life’s most intimate delight. There he 
awaited the coming of his god—and, as it turned out, the com¬ 
ing of man. 

Man came in the spring of 1928. An expedition sponsored 
by Beloit College and Frank G. Logan, vice president of the 
Art Institute of Chicago, had made its way through Algeria 
to the borders of Tunisia, just north of the bleached Sahara. 
The group, headed by Paul Nesbitt and under the general 
direction of Dr. George L. Collie, director of the Logan 
Museum at Beloit, was in its third year of field work. 

But work is slow and discouraging in the Mechta country; 
for the region, which once supported a bountiful life, now 
lies desolate and baked. The temperature sometimes ranges 
between 115 and 150 degrees, Fahrenheit, and it is only between 
five and ten o’clock in the morning that white men can work. 

The winds and heat and torrents of the ages had trans¬ 
formed the surface shells of the mounds into a thick crust. 


73 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


From three to six feet below the surface were exhumed four 
skeletons of a hitherto unknown type of man, splendidly pre¬ 
served by the calcium carbonate formation that had once been 
the refuse of the tribe’s repasts. Besides the skeletons, thousands 
of bone and flint instruments were unearthed and brought 
back to America. 

The Mechta mound man’s tableware was not elaborate. 
Bone points, evidently used for toasting snails over fires, and 
small flints, presumably employed in the delicate business of 
extracting the meat from its casing, served the race in the stead 
of the countless types of knives, forks, spoons, and divers odd¬ 
shaped utensils from which the twentieth century diner has 
to choose before he can negotiate his way from soup to dessert. 
Rudely engraved shells of ostrich eggs, and the burned human 
bones in fireplaces, pointing to cannibalistic tendencies, com¬ 
pleted the culinary ensemble. 

The man whose refuse preserved his bones through thou¬ 
sands of years of nature’s caprices resembled physically the 
modern European more thoroughly than did any other race, 
primitive or modem. He was not racially “pure,” however; 
so his descendants who vaunt their racial purity must with¬ 
draw their claims or repudiate their unsanitary ancestors. 

Comprehensive measurements of the four skeletons disin¬ 
terred from the shell heaps show relationships with the Cro- 
Magnons (a fine physical type of man in Stone Age Europe), 
with the Negroids, and with the ancient, brutish, anthropoid¬ 
like Neanderthal men. 


74 



A PREHISTORIC GARBAGE HEAP 


Anthropologists have come to the conclusion that this Afri¬ 
can was not originally related to the Cro-Magnon or the 
Neanderthaler, but that members of these races entered Africa 
over the land-bridges which then connected Africa and Europe 
at Gibraltar and in the region of Sicily, and underwent inter¬ 
mixture with the mound man. Then, too, it is believed that 
about 12,000 years ago these mound men moved into Europe 
by the same routes. 

One of the skeletons recovered from the mounds reveals char¬ 
acteristics of the Alpine group of twentieth century Europeans. 
Another is of a mixed type with Negroid affinities. The other 
two might be termed primitive Mediterranean. 

Here we have the earliest known evidence of racial inter¬ 
mixture. 

The Mechta man was clearly erect and heavily muscled; 
and his brain case was, according to the prevailing standards, 
well developed. His forehead retreated only slightly, his prog¬ 
nathism (mouth projection) was slight, his chin strong, and 
the development of the ridges over his eyes almost impercep¬ 
tible. This contrasts strikingly with the anthropoid, and with 
the Neanderthal man who dominated the terrestrial scene 
50,000 years ago. The latter had a narrow, slanting forehead, 
a pronounced prognathism, a weak chin, and heavy supraor¬ 
bital ridges. 

The strain of the north African citizen of 15,000 years ago 
is probably found, in one degree or another, in fifty per cent 
of all European-Americans. 


75 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Professor Fay-Cooper Cole, a world-famed anthropologist, 
ventures the opinion that this ancient race originally came into 
Africa from the region between the Nile and Turkestan, which 
is believed by many authorities to be the actual “cradle of man¬ 
kind.” 

Coming into Africa between 50,000 and 25,000 years ago, 
these primitive folk worked out their destinies in the homely 
fashion that we have seen, dotting the landscape with the snail- 
shell mausoleums in which many of them were to be pre¬ 
served for the benefit of modern science. 

Their disappearance, which took place about 11,000 B. C., 
is a mystery. They vanished, just as did the Neanderthalers, 
the Cro-Magnons, and many another vigorous people of by¬ 
gone ages. 


76 



PART III 


In Commerce and Industry 

























































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Chapter I 


LISTENING FOR OIL 

A CARAVAN of lusty youths rumbled into a som- 
nolescent village of western Texas. Gaping natives 
watched the procession move down the main stem of the 
hamlet. The members of the party—a dozen, all told—were 
strangers to the community. They were dressed in khaki; 
their shoes were high without being boots. Clearly they were 
neither catdemen nor farmers. They piloted half a dozen 
small trucks and four passenger cars to the local garage, where 
one of the intruders mounted guard; the rest made their way 
to the building which bore the sign Hotel on its facade. 

It did not take the townspeople long to decide that the 
intruders had come to look for oil. But while this theory was 
the most likely one, it did not satisfy the citizens’ curiosity. 
For West Texans know oil people and oil-well machinery when 
they see them. There was a lucrative field twenty miles away— 
its derricks danced in the dreams of the townsfolk. The 
strangers might be oil seekers, yes, even though there were 
only a dozen of them, but the trucks were weighted with 
contrivances that obviously could not be fitted together to 
drill a well. 


79 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


The visitors were courteous and well behaved, but strangely 
uncommunicative regarding the nature of their business. So 
the townsfolk watched warily. 

The activities of the strangers soon laid their motives open 
to some suspicion. They hired, at wages too generous for any 
righteous business, five or ten of the town’s malcontents whom 
offers of employment had previously failed to lure. The leader 
of the party apparently knew the country. He approached 
several landowners in the environs and paid them from ten 
to fifty dollars apiece for the privilege of excavating on their 
waste land. 

Within a few days the excavating began, and the natives 
learned that one of the trucks was loaded with dynamite. 
Charges of explosive, varying from fifty to five hundred 
pounds, were placed in holes dug about twenty feet deep. 
One truck carried the machinery for detonating the dynamite, 
while three others were maneuvered to positions about two 
miles apart and five miles from the prospective explosion. 

At first, the town laid off work almost to a man. All 
looked hard and hopefully after each explosion. But there 
was never a gush of oil. Stranger still, the natives soon learned 
that the visitors had no expectation of unleashing a gush of oil. 

The three trucks that had been moved about five miles from 
the dynamite cache were laden with dials and inscrutable equip¬ 
ment. From each a small instrument was led about twenty 
inches into the ground. There were no connections, the 
onlookers noted, among the trucks. 


80 



LISTENING FOR OIL 


The performance was sometimes repeated in the same 
vicinity, sometimes on another side of the town. Standing at 
what is popularly regarded as a respectful distance, the 
onlookers were baffled in their attempts to unravel the mystery. 

Soon the cannonading lost its novelty, and the citizenry 
returned to more interesting pursuits, leaving the newcomers 
to blow up waste land to their hearts’ content. Then one 
night, as suddenly as it had come, the troupe packed its 
cabalistic outfit and departed. The men had shot one final 
charge of dynamite in the bed of a stream the day before, 
but when the townsfolk went out to investigate, there was no 
sign of oil. The townsfolk never saw the strange visitors 
again. Sometimes, when a bolt of spring thunder cracks open 
the sky, they remember, and ask one another, “Who were 
those guys, anyway? What was their game?” 

As a matter of fact, the interlopers had been looking, not 
for oil, but for salt domes in the earth—salt domes that had 
been pushed up from inside the earth to within a few hundred 
feet of its surface, and around which oil had been lying in 
giant pools for two-score million years or so. 

The men were commercial scientists, applying the new science 
of geophysics. It is a combination of the science that treats 
of the constitution and structure of the earth and the operation 
of its physical forces— geology —and the science that treats of 
the activities of matter and the laws of energy—physics. 

This application of geophysics to the search for oil resulted 
from the discovery that many of the richest oil fields had their 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


greatest pools in a circle around a sort of pillar of salt—a dome 
of actual sodium chloride in the earth. 

The top of the dome, which is blunted or mushroom-shaped 
and almost cylindrical in plane, is sometimes as near the surface 
of the earth as two hundred feet, sometimes several hundred 
feet farther down. The dome may be about a mile thick, or 
high, and from one to three miles in diameter. 

The wells are sunk above the salt dome, around its edges, 
and in the territory extending out from the periphery. But 
the petroleum industry has in the past had to sink the wells 
first—at a cost of about $50,000 per well—and often no oil 
has been found. Now, if the salt domes could be located first, 
countless millions of dollars in drilling could be saved. 

In the ancient strata of sand and shale which flanked the 
dome, when it was newly risen, there was a certain amount 
of oil, but the oil was so diffused it could scarcely be tapped. 
As time passed, however, the oil was forced upward by the 
downward pressure of the water—heavier than oil—that was 
also in the deposits. Thus the oil formed in pools or pockets 
around the salt dome, concentrated so that when a pipe is 
forced down* the pressure shoots the oil up. As the oil goes 
up through the well, more oil seeps toward the pipe intake until 
the region is fairly well drained. Then the oil is pumped. 

The problem, then, was to locate the presence of the salt 
domes, and thus know where oil might be found in goodly 
quantities, without the necessity of expensive preliminary drill¬ 
ing. Who would have suspected that an instrument used for 


82 



LISTENING FOR OIL 


recording earthquakes would come to man’s aid in his search 
for the precious oil that turns the wheels of a world’s industry? 

The study of sound waves in the earth has long been con¬ 
ducted in connection with seismology—the science of earth¬ 
quake phenomena. Delicate instruments called seismographs, 
located all over the world, record minute tremors caused by 
earthquakes thousands of miles away. Involved mechanisms 
locate the distance of the quake from the point of record and 
measure the severity of the shock. 

It was not until recently, however, that scientists were able 
to apply the principles of seismology to the detection of the 
salt domes, the structures which have been discovered to be 
the core of countless teeming oil pools. 

About twenty-five of these domes have been found thus far, 
all in the region of the Gulf of Mexico—in Texas and Louisi¬ 
ana. The wells have not been sunk as yet, nor will they be 
for several years to come, when new supplies of oil are needed. 
But the industry is satisfied that salt domes mean oil, and 
thus it keeps searching parties in the field at a cost of $1,000 
a day for each party’s work—as insurance for the future. 

The search for salt domes goes on persistently. The privi¬ 
lege of exploding charges of dynamite on a piece of waste land 
is quietly purchased from the farmer or rancher in possession. 
Then the trucks containing the dynamite and the firing 
apparatus proceed to a strategic spot. A hole is dug and the 
charge of dynamite is deposited. Three more trucks—each 
carrying a seismograph to determine the speed of sound waves 


83 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


through the air, on the surface, and under the ground—go 
on to points about five miles from the impending explosion 
and about two miles from each other. 

The men attending the seismographs proceed to plant their 
geophones in the ground at a distance of about twenty yards 
from the trucks, to which the instruments are attached by cables. 
The geophone is like a telephone receiver, except that it is 
much more sensitive. Now the stage is set for the fireworks. 

By the use of radio broadcasting and receiving sets, the 
seismograph men are told to prepare for the explosion. This 
means that every person in the party stands stock still and 
holds his breath, so there will be no extraneous tremor recorded 
on the instruments in the ground. 

At the moment of the explosion a radio wave, traveling at 
the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, is released and 
recorded automatically at the seismographs five miles away. 
Then a sound wave through the air is recorded for the purpose 
of determining the exact distance between the firing point and 
the seismographs. The difference in the time of sending and 
the time of receiving (recorded by the radio wave) is multiplied 
by the known speed of sound waves, with allowance for the 
influence of temperature and wind, and the distance between 
the two points is computed. 

The significant thing is the speed of the ground waves. The 
disturbance caused by the detonation releases these waves in 
every direction. They move comparatively slowly when they 
pass through loose material like sand or shale, but they are 


84 



LISTENING FOR OIL 


known to move more rapidly through salt domes, which are 
more solid and conducive to speed. Having determined the 
distance between the two points, the chief of the party knows 
how much time a ground wave traveling through sand or shale 
requires to traverse that distance. 

If, as the chief studies the records later, he finds that the 
waves came faster than they should come through sand and 
shale, he decides to move to another point and “cross-fan;” 
that is, repeat the experiment from a point that is probably at 
another side of the dome. 

In this manner the existence of the dome is determined (if 
the results of the “cross-fanning” concur with the results of 
the original “fanning”), and its boundaries are established. 

How do the waves get down to the top of the salt dome, 
if it is at least two hundred feet below the ground, and how 
do they get up to the surface again? This question the 
geophysicist answers with the explanation that when the waves 
are “broadcast” on the ground they travel in every direction, 
some of them going down. 

If there is a salt dome, they strike it and pick up speed, 
moving very rapidly over the two- or three-mile surface of the 
dome, and thus outracing the waves which are going slowly 
through the sand and the shale. As the waves that have been 
speeding through the salt dome reach the end of the dome, 
they are imparted to the sand and shale, where they lose 
speed. But, even though they lose speed and have to travel 
upward more slowly before they are recorded on the geophone, 

85 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


they arrive at their destination ahead of the waves which have 
been ambling in leisurely fashion through the sand and shale 
near the surface. 

If the speed through sand and shale over the established 
distance should be one full second, say, and the chief finds 
that a wave has been recorded in one-half or two-thirds of a 
second, he knows that somewhere along the road was a mile 
or two-mile stretch of speedway. That speedway is salt. And 
deep around the edges of that salt are black lakes. Those 
lakes are oil. 

We have enough oil on tap right now to last us a long 
while—maybe ten years, maybe fifty. But some day the cry 
will go up for more oil. Then the dozen youngsters who 
bowled into that Texas town with their new-fangled science 
will stand trial. 


86 



Chapter II 


THE ROBOTS ARE COMING 

M AN has never yet created life. That is one formula 
that is just beyond his reach; he recognizes it as a 
manifestation of some sub-atomic process that eludes his grasp. 
But if he could not create life, could he not perhaps construct 
a mechanism to function like a living being? The scientist 
sets out to manufacture an artificial man—a man who will toil 
day and night but never suffer from an aching back or tired 
feet. 

Literature has long toyed with the idea. In 1818 Mrs. 
Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel about a student who 
created a man out of odds and ends gathered from graveyard 
and dissecting-room. In the present century the mechanical 
man has made two notable appearances: in the Yiddish play 
The Golem , based on an ancient legend, and in the recent 
drama, R. U. R., which has given world-currency to the word 
robot as a servant machine. But in every fanciful case the 
mechanical man has turned against his creator, causing disaster 
and death until his own eventual extermination. 

Within the last few years the General Electric Company has 
produced in its research laboratories at Schenectady four 


87 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


signally useful mechanical servants, each of which does at least 
a significant share of a man’s work. 

Unfailing and untiring, an electrical “man” is now counting, 
hour after hour, month after month, the number of vehicles 
passing through one of the the two tubes forming the Holland 
tunnel, the two-mile boulevard under the Hudson River, which 
connects New York with New Jersey. This traffic checker is 
an experimental unit of a proposed system that engineers en¬ 
vision as a revolutionary step in the control and protection 
of traffic. 

The experimental unit is located at the exit end of the 
New York-New Jersey tunnel, or “tube.” The apparatus 
consists of a small flood-light mounted in an inclined position 
upon the overhead iron-work of the tunnel, its slender beam 
of light falling upon a little circular window in a box located 
just beneath the sidewalk at the opposite end of the roadway. 
The box contains a photo-electric tube (the electrical “eye”), 
an amplifying tube, and an electrical relay. 

Every time a vehicle passes the spot, the beam of light 
falling upon the photo-electric tube through the little window 
is interrupted, affecting the photo-electric tube so that a slight 
electrical impulse is created. This is amplified by the vacuum 
tube and fed to the relay, which energizes a transmission circuit 
ending in the administration building of the Tunnel Commis¬ 
sion. There a registering dial is actuated by the electrical 
current so that it turns, registering one more figure in response 
to each impulse from the relay. 


8* 



THE ROBOTS ARE COMING 


The plan, or rather the dream, of the engineers visualizes 
each of the tunnels divided into sections, with one of these 
units at the beginning of each section and one at each end 
of both tunnels. The count will be registered upon an indicator 
board in the administration buildings on each side of the river. 
By watching the dials, one will be able to tell instantly the exact 
volume of traffic passing through each tunnel at all times. 

A sudden large increase in the number of vehicles in one 
section, with a concomitant slight decrease in the number in 
the section ahead, will indicate a congestion, resulting, perhaps, 
from an accident. The trouble point will be more quickly 
located and the ventilation more effectively regulated than by 
any existing method. In the event of a complete tie-up in 
either tunnel, the engineers will know at once the number and 
distribution of vehicles penned in, and they will be enabled 
to adjust the vital matter of ventilation without delay. 

It has been estimated that fifteen million vehicles pass 
through the Holland tunnel every year. An electric eye— 
infallible, unwinking—will check this estimate with an exacti¬ 
tude that cannot be achieved by a corps of men. Thus the 
builders of the future will know better how to distribute strength 
and elasticity in the construction of bridges and tunnels. 

This is only one function of the electric eye. In a still newer 
capacity this robot watchman detects the clearness of the atmos¬ 
phere and furnishes the tunnel engineers with an instantaneous 
alarm when haze, fog, or dust impairs the vision of drivers 
beyond the limits of safety. 


89 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


As now experimentally used in the tunnel, the electric eye 
is directly connected with a recording device a quarter of a 
mile from the mouth of the tunnel. Impulses from the photo¬ 
electric tube guide a pencil-point over a sheet of paper ruled 
graphically to indicate time and volume. At any instant, by 
glancing at the record, the supervisor of the tunnel can inform 
himself of the amount of haze permeating the subterranean 
traffic arteries, and if the visibility decreases from any cause 
whatsoever he can relieve the situation by speeding up the 
fans or by putting extra fans into service. 

Here is a job that the mechanical man can do infinitely 
better than his creator. The falling fog in the open country 
is not perceptible to the human eye until it has congealed 
heavily. In the unnatural confines of this pipe-like structure, 
the obstruction of light is even less easily discernible. But 
the man-made eye sees it and records it, transmitting a warning 
to the supervisor that the visibility has been dimmed and that 
the lives of the motorists in the tunnel are endangered by col¬ 
lision or by panic. 

The electric eye depends for its operation upon a principle 
discovered by Hertz in 1888, for which Einstein gave the first 
equations, a principle which is vital in television and talking 
pictures. 

Light falling upon certain alkali metals will generate a 
feeble flow of electricity. Tiny chunks of light, or quanta, 
will displace tiny chunks of electricity, or electrons, from the 
metal, and the brighter the light is, the bigger will be the elec- 


90 



THE ROBOTS ARE COMING 


trical flow. In General Electric’s photo-electric cell any change 
in the amount of light falling upon the potassium hydride 
within is detected in one one-hundred-millionth of a second. 

The projected use of the photo-electric tube as a detector 
may presage the development of a mechanical watchman for 
houses and stores—one that will sound an alarm at the first 
appearance of smoke on the premises. In the not-too-distant 
future this electrical watchman may be installed in cellars, 
in attics, and in warehouses filled with combustible goods. 
Connected with a bell or a siren, this apparatus will announce 
that the path of ever-wakeful light has been crossed by the 
tiny wisps of smoke that indicate the presence of fire. 

The electric eye in the Holland tunnel is successful as a 
guardian against the wafted, inanimate smoke and fog. But 
the General Electric engineers have gone further—they have 
connected the eye with a voice and produced a policeman! 

Should a burglar force his way at night into the Museum 
of Peaceful Arts in New York City—should he sheathe his 
gun after ascertaining that no watchman or policeman appar¬ 
ently is in the vicinity—should he be crowding a gunny-sack 
full of priceless art treasures—should he be making his way 
to freedom and criminal luxury—then—halloo!—he might hear 
a distinctly menacing voice behind him command: 

“Stick ’em up—all the way! I’ve got you covered!” 

Should all this happen, some murky midnight in this sanc¬ 
tuary of beauty, the chances are that the intruder would hur¬ 
riedly “stick ’em up” as requested, and keep them up until a 


91 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


squad of police, which had started for the scene when the 
burglar crossed the mere slit of light, arrived at the place of 
action. And the chances are that the miscreant would be 
speedily rolled away to temporal punishment by the People 
and his loot safely restored to the museum. 

The foregoing snack of melodrama is imaginary; but the 
situation is only mildly hypothetical. Today, when a visitor 
to the Museum steps from the elevator into the great room 
housing a valuable exhibit, he hears, not the command to “stick 
’em up,” but a courteous invitation to register. There is no 
human owner of that voice—the speaker is in a little box, and 
the speech—recorded on a disk—never varies. The victrola 
starts when anyone passes through a beam of light. 

The electric eye has been conscripted for still a newer func¬ 
tion—that of watchman over the precious human eye. A 
mechanism has been developed that turns on the lights in a 
schoolroom when the failing light of late afternoon or of 
cloud-clotted skies passes the imperceptible line at which it 
becomes a menace to the delicate sight of the children. 

The daylight filters through a lens on to a photo-electric 
tube which is set for a certain degree of daylight intensity. 
Whenever the light outside falls below this mark, the photo¬ 
electric tube causes a small relay to switch on the lights in the 
schoolroom. If the skies clear and the intensity of daylight 
again reaches the proper mark, off go the lights. In the mean¬ 
time, many pairs of human eyes have been protected. 

Eyes are important. Science has created a super-eye. 


92 



Chapter III 


DIAGNOSING A RAILROAD WHISTLE. 

T HE “Limited” gives no quarter. It is another of man’s 
servants that at any moment may become like Franken¬ 
stein’s monster. Its piercing clarion clears the way for the 
dazzling streak of steel. Men and beasts that do not hear 
and heed the shrieking steam quickly find themselves, or rather 
they are found by others, dismembered beyond the possibility 
of successful reassembly of their parts. 

Mishaps at railroad crossings have increased appallingly 
year by year. Whole families are exterminated; automobiles 
—the most common party of the second part in these unfor¬ 
tunate encounters—are pulverized. Sometimes the driver, or 
some other member of the mangled group, survives long enough 
to moan, “I didn’t hear the whistle,” or “I didn’t know it 
was so close,” or “I didn’t know it was a train.” 

All too often it is a case of “I didn’t hear the whistle.” And 
yet the Casey Joneses of today blow their whistles at every 
bend, at every crossing. The man in the cab, knowing that 
it is almost always too late to stop his mile-a-minute Jugger¬ 
naut, once he has seen the carload of frightened blunderers in 
his path, does not forget to “give ’er a toot” at any and every 


93 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


junction, ranging from a country cow-path to a transcontinen¬ 
tal speedway. 

The number of railroad-crossing deaths traceable to igno¬ 
rance of the approach of a train continues, notwithstanding 
the insistent tooting of whistles, to set new “highs.” The 
railroads cannot maintain watchmen and gatemen at the 
thousands of intersections along their tracks. They plead 
with the car-driver and the pedestrian, by means of large, 
conspicuous signs, to STOP, LOOK, LISTEN! Their en¬ 
gineers begin sounding the siren of warning a mile before the 
crossing is reached. Then the responsibility shifts to the human 
caterpillars to avoid being crushed to a jelly. 

Only the drunkard and the fool still persist in trying to 
beat the train to the crossing. And only a negligible fraction 
of drivers suffer from seriously impaired hearing. Yet the 
accidents continue. 

A few years ago, a “Limited” operated by one of the great¬ 
est trunk lines in the United States demolished a school-bus 
filled with children, at a crossing just outside a small Ohio 
town. Seventeen children were killed, but the driver of the 
bus recovered. 

Why didn’t he hear the whistle? 

He was a trusted, competent resident of the town. He had 
negotiated the crossing, with his precious burden, hundreds 
of times, many of them in fogs heavier than the one out of 
which the train had plunged its living tonnage into the bus. 
He testified that he had stopped before crossing the tracks, 


94 




DIAGNOSING A RAILROAD WHISTLE 


had walked on to the crossing, and listened for approaching 
trains; then had resumed his seat and driven into the path of 
the locomotive. 

The engineer and fireman of the train were veterans in the 
railroad’s employ; they had made this “crack” run hundreds 
of times. Their records as railroad men were punctuated with 
rewards for character and service. They testified that the head¬ 
light was burning, that the bell was ringing, and that the 
whistle was sounding, as they pounded through the heavy 
murk that shrouded the region. 

The railroad officials, nonplussed, persuaded Professor A. L. 
Foley, head of the Department of Physics and director of the 
Waterman Institute for Scientific Research at Indiana Uni¬ 
versity, to study the problem. Professor Foley had experi¬ 
mented with various phases of acoustics for fifteen years. The 
results of the application of his specialized knowledge to the 
problem of the locomotive whistle then explained the likelihood 
of the engineer’s integrity in seventy-five per cent of the cases 
in which the engineer testified that he blew his whistle and the 
victim testified he listened for a signal and heard none. 

The equipment of the locomotive that figured in the Ohio 
disaster was brought to Dr. Foley’s laboratory and tested under 
all sorts of weather conditions. 

Not satisfied that fogs, winds, and other atmospheric con¬ 
ditions are alone responsible for the failure of warning signals 
to reach the ears of persons about to cross railroad tracks, the 
scientist delved more extensively into the problem. He installed 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


a regulation locomotive whistle at the power-house of the 
University, and tested its sounding qualities for distances up 
to five miles. 

He then arranged for a more realistic series of investigations 
by obtaining for study the use of several “big eight-wheelers 
of a mighty frame,” as the Casey Jones saga describes them, 
from the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville Railway, operating 
through the University town. 

His earliest tests proved that locomotive whistles, located, 
as they are, on the “roof” of the frame, behind the smokestack 
and steam-dome, and often behind the generator, are in a 
poor position to give warning signals down the track ahead 
of them. This location, Dr. Foley found, resulted in the blast’s 
being fended off at right angles to the track, instead of down 
the track where it is needed. 

Not only does this deflection of sound by the smokestack and 
steam-dome impede the efficiency of the whistle; the hot gases 
from the engine, in front of the whistle, act as a dispersive lens. 
The result is that when the locomotive is running at a good 
speed a blanket of these hot gases is formed which tends to 
absorb and refract the sound waves, so that the intensity of 
the whistle’s sound in front of the locomotive is much less 
than it is at right angles to the track. 

To eliminate the effect of wind and other conditions, tests 
were conducted with a locomotive in different positions on a 
turntable. 

Confirming Dr. Foley’s theories, the measurements revealed 


96 



DIAGNOSING A RAILROAD WHISTLE 


that the sound of the whistle was twice as intense at the side 
of the locomotive, where the sound is not only superfluous but 
actually a nuisance to persons living along the right of way, 
as it is in front of the locomotive, where the warning signal is 
essential. 

To remedy this defect, Dr. Foley placed the whistle in front 
of the locomotive and inside a reflector somewhat similar to 
that in which the headlight of the locomotive is placed. The 
reflector served a double purpose: it reflected the reverberations 
ahead of the train, and acted as a resonator to intensify the 
sound. 

The use of a simple reflector resulted in the production of 
sound intensity three times as great down the track as it was 
at right angles to the rails. This meant a sixfold increase 
of intensity over the whistle used without a reflector and in 
the customary location behind the smokestack, steam-dome, 
and generator. 

Another important consideration when the warning signal 
is atop the structure instead of in front, Dr. Foley found, is 
the interference with the functioning of the whistle by the heavy 
air pressure resulting from the tremendous speed with which 
the locomotive cleaves the atmosphere. 

When a train is traveling sixty miles an hour, one-third of 
the whistle area is rendered ineffective by the “boxing” of the 
column of air pressure. Consequently, there follows a “swish¬ 
ing” sound when the whistle is in operation. This sound, 
which is sufficiently familiar to travelers, provides an inade- 


97 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


quate warning signal. The use of the reflector would, of course, 
eliminate this defect, since the reflector carries with it its own 
body of air, and all parts of the signal will function regardless 
of the speed of the locomotive. 

Dr. Foley points out that all railroad whistles should be 
standardized. Whistles producing a note of high, shrill pitch, 
such as he recommends, should be restricted to the use of rail¬ 
road locomotives. This would result in the public’s subcon¬ 
scious identification of the warning shriek of the locomotive 
whenever it is heard. The instant reaction would be caution. 
Just as the motorist turns his car in to the curb as soon as 
there strikes upon his ear the sound of the siren horn that he 
knows is restricted to the use of fire apparatus, so would the 
motorist, the pedestrian, and even perhaps the cow, learn to 
react automatically to the specialized note of a train whistle. 

Aside from the humanitarian aspect of the problem, there 
is an important economic factor involved. Professor Foley 
appends to the report of his investigation a summary of a bit 
of economic research that reveals an immense sum of money 
wasted annually under the regime of ineffective whistles. The 
steam required per hour to blow a locomotive whistle of the 
standard type is 8,352 pounds, necessitating the evaporation of 
more than four tons of water and the attendant consumption of 
1,190 pounds of coal. 

The locomotives of the nation whistle, it is estimated, 11,200 
hours a day, at a cost of 6,664 tons of coal daily, or 2,434,026 
tons a year. Figuring the cost of coal at $3.00 a ton, Dr. 


98 



DIAGNOSING A RAILROAD WHISTLE 


Foley arrived at the total expenditure of more than $7,000,000 
a year for the blowing of our locomotive whistles. 

By taking advantage of the improvements his investigation 
has suggested Dr. Foley believes that the railroads can reduce 
their coal bill for whistle blowing two-thirds, with a resultant 
saving of human lives, which, unlike coal, cannot be translated 
into dollars. 

Seven thousand men, women, and children are killed in 
railroad accidents every year. More than one hundred thou¬ 
sand are injured and maimed. The great railroad executive 
is helpless; so he turns to the scientist. The scientist focuses 
his quiet insight on the locomotive whistle. A year or so, and 
the job—the scientist’s job—is finished. He presents his diag¬ 
nosis and his prescription to the industrialist. Then he with¬ 
draws—to tackle another problem. 





PART IV 


Man and His Ills 





Chapter I 


TRACKING DOWN THE “FLU” GERM 

I N THE early winter of 1918-’ 19, a “new” infectious disease 
ran like wildfire over the United States. Its toll of lives 
was terrific. “Spanish influenza” was the name of the strange 
malady, abbreviated in everyday speech to “the flu.” Some 
authorities attributed the scourge—which first appeared in 
Europe—to war conditions. 

Oddly enough, the ailment was not fatal in itself. But it 
destroyed the tissues and broke down resistance; then deadly 
pneumonia rushed in and swept away lives by the tens of 
thousands. 

Awaking of a morning, during that grievous winter, many 
a man or a woman who the day or the week before had been 
cited as “the picture of health,” felt languid and prostrated— 
“low,” it came to be called. Medical examination revealed a 
sharp decrease from normal in the number of white corpuscles 
in the blood. The throat was red and sore, the nostrils irritated, 
the mucous membrane in the air passages inflamed. 

Rales—a sort of rattle in the lungs—could be detected with 
a stethoscope. Headache, backache, loss of appetite—all these 
pressed into the dispirited frame overnight. 


103 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


Physicians were bewildered. They prescribed rest, and the 
ordinary treatment for severe colds and bronchitis. But lives 
continued to slip through their fingers in a week or ten days. 
Practitioners, with all their skill, with all their untiring service 
and sacrifice, could neither arrest nor parry the assaults of the 
storm. Many themselves fell victims. The undertakers 
worked hardest. 

Today, in the cemeteries of the nation’s greatest cities, where 
the “flu” flourished like Kansas sunflowers, there remain tragic 
memorials of the plague in the form of countless thousands of 
headstones with dates in the months of December, 1918, and 
January, 1919. 

Before spring, the epidemic had spent itself. Man as an in¬ 
dividual was slow to shake the mantle of despair from his 
shoulders; but man in the mass discarded his sackcloth and 
ashes and turned his face toward the summer’s sunlight. 

It was science, however, that recoiled first from the blow. 
Before the last dead were buried, scientists were at work in 
their laboratories, seeking to unravel the mystery of this 
elusive distemper. 

It was patent that the disease must be due to a germ—one 
that had never as yet been isolated and identified. Now the 
discovery and capture of the germ—the living, microscopic 
organism that carried and transmitted the specific poison— 
had proved to be the key to victory in the conquest of many 
infectious diseases. 

From the dead germ, a vaccine might be made. Or the 


104 



TRACKING DOWN THE “FLU” GERM 


morbid essence that communicates the malady might be made 
the basis of an antitoxin. This, injected into the body which 
nurtured the noxious bacteria, neutralizes the living germ, 
thus effecting a cure. Bacteriologists all over the world took 
up the search. The results were discouraging. 

Finally, ten years later (after several minor epidemics, and 
one that approached in virulence the first, had come and gone), 
“42x” was discovered and isolated by a thirty-year-old scientist 
who had worked at the job for six years in an obscure laboratory 
at the University of Chicago. 

On December 12, 1929, Dr. Isidore S. Falk announced that 
with the assistance of fourteen research associates, all of whom 
had developed the disease that they had at last succeeded in 
solving, influenza of mild and violent types had been pro¬ 
duced in monkeys by the injection of a certain one of the 
3,800 different microbes that were being studied. 

Announcements had previously been made, from time to 
time, all over the world, of the discovery of the guilty germ, 
but confirmation had failed to follow. Bacteriologists of every 
country had undertaken a race—a race that promised no reward 
to the winner. But they were handicapped by the failure of 
the “flu” to appear on a large scale until November, 1928. 

Then an epidemic broke out on the Pacific coast, reaching 
heights that approached the affliction of a decade earlier. Like 
Hannibars army, it lost much of its strength in its march 
over the mountains. But it reached the Middle West with 
a reserve force potent enough to double the death rate in the 


105 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


city of Chicago that winter. Somewhere between one-half 
and one-tenth of Chicago’s three million inhabitants were 
stricken. 

Once more a helpless humanity wondered and prayed and 
died. December 12 marked the peak of the epidemic. On 
that day, the institution which Dr. Falk served closed its doors 
in an effort to check the spread of the infection. Within five 
days, half the educational establishments in the surrounding 
region had dismissed their students. 

On the day that the University closed its doors, Dr. Falk 
mobilized his resources for an intensive campaign. Fie called 
for volunteers; four responded. Informed of the bacteriologist’s 
intention to work eighteen hours a day, so long as the epidemic 
furnished virulent material for study, three men and one 
woman signified their willingness to trade blows with the 
“flu” germ until they had won or were definitely beaten. 

The first move was the acquisition of several dozen Rhesus 
monkeys, a type of simian known to be susceptible to influenza 
but not to pneumonia. These were escorted to the student 
infirmary, which was crowded beyond its capacity—as was 
every hospital in the city—with sufferers. From influenza- 
stricken volunteers samples of blood were taken, as well as 
throat swabs. Some of the animals were inoculated with blood, 
some with mucus samples from human throats, and some 
with both. The workers then made cultures from each volun¬ 
teer’s blood and throat. 

Blood and mucus samples were taken from a total of twenty- 


106 



TRACKING DOWN THE “FLU” GERM 


three persons, including laboratory assistants who had mani¬ 
fested symptoms of the disease. There were, in all, 125 
monkeys inoculated with the blood or mucus that contained 
somewhere in its substance the virus that caused the disease. 

Skillfully plying their fine platinum wires, the investigators 
streaked thousands of specimens of blood and mucus from 
all the men and all the monkeys on culture dishes. They 
streaked each sample until the wire was ostensibly clean and 
its line became invisible. And they knew that the invisible 
lines contained individual microbes. 

When they came back 24 hours later the invisible individual 
bacteria had each grown by self-multiplication into visible 
colonies containing millions of cells. With each colony the 
process of streaking was repeated until the investigators were 
certain of the absolute isolation of one organism. 

But there were 3,800 different microbes obtained, through 
the culture process, from the animals and the human beings. 
Which one of the 3,800 suspects was guilty? That was the 
problem which confronted the investigators. The task before 
them was Herculean, but their enthusiasm carried them along 
on its buoyant crest. Ten additional members of the bac¬ 
teriology department, inspired by the devotion of the little 
company, swelled the number of workers to fifteen. 

All but 100 of the nearly 4,000 suspects were disposed of 
in quick order. Then the 100, each representing a unique 
clan of microscopic criminals, were installed in healthy monkeys. 
After that came the unrelenting surveillance of the animals 


107 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


for symptoms of the dread “flu.” But the results were not 
at all spectacular. 

As the epidemic showed signs of waning, the searchers grew 
desperate. The germ had to be caught before the epidemic ran 
its course—not to return, perhaps, for years, when it might 
suddenly descend upon humanity again in redoubled force. 
The workers gave up going to their homes to sleep; they 
slept on their desks. Dr. Falk had an alarm clock at his elbow 
that awakened him every half-hour, after long sessions with 
the microscope had numbed his brain. 

December 21, 1928, had been a cruel day. By this time 
almost half of the little group were in the hospital. 

After midnight light-heartedness is not as fluent in a 
laboratory as it is in a cabaret. The workers had agreed to 
speak at the first signs of “flu” sickness in any of them. But 
the men in the hospital had hesitated to report—they thought 
it was fatigue and not the oncoming of influenza that had 
overtaken them. Miss Ruth McKinney, one of the four 
original volunteers, felt ill. Remembering the promise, she 
ventured to speak. 

A colleague mechanically took a sample of blood from her 
arm. The blood was streaked on a culture plate, and the 
culture—numbered 42—was put in the incubator for twenty- 
four hours. Then it was removed, stained with aniline dye 
(bacteria are normally transparent, but they absorb the colors 
of certain dyes), and lo! there were colonies—blue and pink 
clumps of microbes—all of one type. 


108 



TRACKING DOWN THE “FLU” GERM 


It was a streptococcus type; that is, the colonies were arranged 
in chains, or links; they were pleomorphic—many-shaped—and 
grouped irregularly, like beads restrung by a child. It was 
referred to then as the “pleomorphic streptococcus.” 

Was this the mysterious influenza germ? The investigators 
had no special reason to suspect it was anything more than 
just another germ successfully isolated. 

Later, two types of germs were found living in this culture 
42. One was labeled “x,” the other “y.” The “y” germ was 
proved to have resulted from contamination in handling 
the culture. Falk and his assistants then prepared for the 
inoculation of 42x into a monkey. 

By this time the germs being studied had been reduced to 
eight general types; 42x was merely one of the many specific 
bacteria that could be classified into these eight groups. 

On December 29, 1928, monkey No. 14b, an animal that 
had been enjoying perfect health, and had not previously been 
subjected to experiment, was inoculated. A large dose, con¬ 
sisting of millions of germs grown from 42x, was administered. 

Things began to happen. On New Year’s Day, 1929, 
the members of the group who were still able to walk were 
congregated in the laboratory. The count of Mb’s white 
corpuscles had increased soon after the inoculation, but had 
decreased sharply and significantly by the second day following. 
Other symptoms soon appeared. Within a week, 14b was 
clearly suffering from influenza. 

The germ was given to other healthy monkeys. They lost 

109 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


vigor, their throats were inflamed, their dispositions became 
rniiggy, they curled up, blinked abnormally, shrank from light 
flashed in their eyes. Science was seeking mercy for millions 
of human beings, so these monkeys had to die—in as painless 
a manner as death can be imposed. 

Post-mortem examination clinched the proof. Mucus was 
found to have accumulated in their windpipes and respiratory 
tubes. The early symptoms of bronchial pneumonia—also 
characteristic of full-blown influenza—were revealed. 

The eighteen-hour day which had been kept up without 
interruption ended for all the workers but Dr. Falk about 
January 10, 1929. The epidemic was practically over. 

But the job was not finished. They had yet to keep that 
42x germ alive—flourishing and deadly—before they could 
prove conclusively that it was responsible for the “flu.” Pos¬ 
sibly monkey No. 14b might have become infected in some 
manner other than from this germ, although every person 
involved in the inoculation on that fateful December 29 had 
subsequently fallen ill, despite the wearing of masks and the 
utilization of all possible precautions. 

Repetition of the experiment, with all its embellishments, 
carried the adventurers to the end of September. Germ 42x 
had to be preserved indefinitely if it was to furnish the cure 
for influenza. Hundreds of culture mediums were tried, and 
finally the successful combination was obtained. 

Chocolate, the investigators called it. Actually it was a 
combination of agar-agar (a seaweed) and sheep’s blood. 


110 



TRACKING DOWN THE “FLU” GERM 


When this medium was heated to a degree approaching the 
boiling point, 42x sprouted sturdily. 

Next, workers found that rough, pock-marked colonies of 
this germ produce the disease perfectly (these are the virulent 
type), while the smooth-surfaced clumps do not. The smooth 
colonies they found to be present in the throats of normal 
persons. When the colonies become rougher, they produce 
a type of cold in simians. A still more advanced stage of 
unevenness is associated with bronchitis. In its most jagged 
state, 42x means influenza. But the discovery of “the germ of 
the common cold” was disavowed. Other germs, perhaps, also 
produce the common cold. 

Could this virulence be developed artificially, now that the 
deadly form of the germ had vanished with the disappearance 
of the epidemic? The scientists incubated a colony of their 
precious microbes. From the resultant enlarged community 
they selected the roughest examples, streaked them out on a 
culture, and let them thrive. 

After fifteen repetitions of this process—that is, fifteen 
generations of 42x developed from the shaggiest specimens 
in each generation—the bacteria had achieved their ultimate 
virulence. 

But would the virulent germs produce influenza in humans? 
That question is not yet answered. The fifteen men and women 
who had participated in the experiment were eager to replace 
the monkeys as test subjects. But they had all fallen victims 
to the malady already—fortunately without fatal results—and 


111 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


in so doing they had achieved an immunity of unknown dura¬ 
tion. Others offered themselves for the test—but the scientists 
did not wish to subject them to so serious a risk. 

The discovery and isolation of 42x is a step—a begin¬ 
ning—nothing more. If, as a result of further experiments, 
42x will yield to the efforts of bacteriology to extract from its 
body a preparation that will knock the pock-mark spots out 
of its whole race, and if such a preparation clearly fortifies 
men against the disease, then the little band of workers who 
filled the hectic nights with their beautiful skill will get into 
the text-books. If more years of labor prove their trail to be 
a blind one, then they will deposit 42x in a neat, tight container, 
place it in a remote corner, and begin again. 


112 



Chapter II 


THE STORY OF ETHYLENE 

E THYLENE, although as yet little known to the public, 
is the safest and most effective anaesthetic ever perfected. 
Its remarkable qualities were stumbled upon by men who 
were trying to prove that it was a deadly poison. The story 
of ethylene is the tale of two courageous experimenters and 
of a hundred unwitting pioneers of science. 

The men who proved that ethylene is a boon instead of 
a menace, by trying it on themselves, were Professor Arno B. 
Luckhardt, physiologist at the University of Chicago, and 
his student assistant, J. L. Carter. Carnations, frogs, rats, 
kittens, mice, guinea pigs, dogs—these were the humble 
co-discoverers, with Luckhardt and Carter, of the anaesthetic 
that assures weak-hearted, weak-kidneyed, and weak-lunged 
patients immunity from the dangers of ether and laughing-gas. 

The drama of the discovery of ethylene carries us over a 
period of about twenty years. Luckhardt’s appearance on the 
scene dates from a luncheon gathering at which the young 
physiologist—he was but twenty-five at the time—and a friend 
of his, Dr. William Crocker, a botanist, were present. 

Crocker was telling the story of an experiment with ethylene 


113 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


gas, which had been causing trouble by “putting carnations 
to sleep.” He had been consulted by a group of Wisconsin 
carnation growers who had been receiving complaints from 
Chicago florists that the flowers shipped to them “went to 
sleep” as soon as they reached the greenhouses. Since carna¬ 
tions never “wake up,” once they have folded their petals and 
“gone to sleep,” the matter was serious. The florists were 
losing money on carnations. 

Crocker visited the greenhouses whence the complaints had 
come. He found four tiny leaks in the gas lines. The 
amount of gas escaping was, from the human being’s point 
of view, negligible. But the botanist suspected that some 
element in this common illuminating gas was fatal, even in 
infinitesimal quantities, to the sensitive carnations. 

He experimented in his laboratory with some of the flowers, 
which he placed under glass jars, and confirmed his sus¬ 
picion that a small amount of the illuminating gas injected 
into the pure air was responsible for the death of the carnations. 
What element in the gas was fatal to the flowers? The botanist 
did not know. He simply knew that ordinary illuminating gas 
included ethylene and carbon monoxide in its composition. 

First, Crocker studied the effect of subjecting the carnations 
to a carbon monoxide atmosphere. It seemed to have no effect 
on them. But when he subjected the blossoms to an ethylene- 
sprayed atmosphere, he found that one part of the mysterious 
gas to two million parts of air produced their instantaneous 
death. 


114 



THE STORY OF ETHYLENE 


The young physiologist was stirred by the botanist’s account. 
Ethylene was evidently more poisonous than carbon monoxide; 
and yet science had been satisfied for years that it was the carbon 
monoxide alone that was fatal to persons who met their death 
through gas asphyxiation. 

Could this ethylene element paralyze the life force long 
before the carbon monoxide took effect? Here was a new 
problem—one that science had not yet tackled. 

Luckhardt’s first move was an elementary one: he mixed 
blood with a quantity of ethylene. Poisonous gases generally 
alter the color of the blood. But ethylene failed to produce 
that effect. 

In the press of other duties, the youthful scientist postponed 
further work on an experiment that seemed to be leading him 
up a blind alley. The problem, however, was not forgotten; 
it fascinated him, and he came back to it seven years later. 
The United States was at war, and Luckhardt had been put 
in charge of the University’s physiology department. 

He had not been able to dismiss the suspicion that ethylene 
was a fatal poison to man and beast; so he set himself to work 
on new experiments. 

Certain accommodating frogs were subjected to one part 
of ethylene in forty parts of air that was circulating in their 
fruit-jar homes in the laboratory. This combination was fifty 
times as poisonous—so Luckhardt thought—as the atmosphere 
that had killed the carnations. But the frogs, after breathing 
the tainted air, manifested complete sang {void. This gesture 

115 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


of indifference to scientific endeavor annoyed Dr. Luckhardt. 

He decided to give them a terrific dose in the next experiment. 
He increased the percentage of ethylene to twenty thousand 
times more than the amount that had killed the carnations. 
Again the frogs figuratively laughed at him. Irritated, Luck¬ 
hardt now filled the jars with a composition of 80 per cent 
ethylene and 20 per cent air. Only then did the frogs’ eyes 
r ssume the glassiness of intoxication. They sat down and 
looked around stupidly, as would a late homeward-bound com¬ 
muter trying to keep awake until he reaches his station. 

Still Luckhardt did not understand. Deadly poison— 
deadlier than carbon monoxide? Was it? 

Then he remembered that the frog is a cold-blooded animal; 
its blood assumes the temperature of its surroundings. Man, 
however, is warm-blooded; his body heat is essentially constant. 
And the rat, like man and all other mammals, also is warm¬ 
blooded. Perhaps the rat would “fold up its petals,” so to 
speak, in an ethylene-saturated atmosphere. 

Several rats, accordingly, were corralled for the experiment 
and placed in fruit-jars. The gas was administered. When 
the solution reached the 80 per cent stage, the animals began 
to reel in an unratly manner; finally they lay down. The 
physiologist lifted the inert forms out of the jars and pummeled 
them. But the rats were “out.” Nose-tweakings, ear-pinch- 
ings, slaps on the body—all were unavailing. Luckhardt left 
them for dead. When he returned a few minutes later he 
found his “corpses” frisking about the laboratory. 


116 



THE STORY OF ETHYLENE 


Luckhardt repeated the performance several times, with 
similar results. Then he sat down and wondered. 

He had failed—failed to prove that ethylene was a fatal 
poison to animals. But for the second time his work was 
interrupted. Problems of more immediate importance, bred 
of the war, clamored for his time and energy. Ethylene was 
laid aside. 

In 1922, the scientist was no longer the youth who had 
been enthralled by the story of the carnations a dozen years 
before. He was now a married man and the father of three 
children. His temples were becoming tinged with gray. He 
had gained an eminent place in the world of scientific research. 
But he had not forgotten those puzzling experiments with 
ethylene. 

Now, with J. L. Carter, an eager young student assistant, 
he turned again to the strange gas. He had become confident 
that it was not a poison, worthless to man. He had pondered 
much over its possibilities as an agent of relief for human 
pain. So the glass jars were again installed, the ethylene 
generated. 

This time, the dog was to have his day—and the cat and 
the guinea pig. Upon the application of ethylene, they, like 
the rats before them, curled up in happy slumber. Cudgeled 
and pricked, they uttered no protest. Then, when the masks had 
been removed and the patients given a few whiffs of fresh air, 
the cats looked about them and purred contentedly, the dogs 
barked lustily, and the guinea pigs squealed for food. 


117 



STEPS IN THE DARE 


Now came the semi-final step. Surgery had not yet been 
attempted on ethylene-anaesthetized animals. A dog was 
selected for the trial. Luckhardt wielded the knife; his assistant 
had charge of the anaesthetic. The gas was applied. Luck¬ 
hardt noticed that the animal relaxed at once. He cut. 

“Hold on!” cried his partner. “He’s not ‘under’ yet.” 

“Too late,” Luckhardt replied, regretfully. For all scientists 
wish to avoid the infliction of unnecessary pain upon the 
animals with which they are experimenting. 

Luckhardt watched the dog carefully, and made an astonish¬ 
ing discovery. The patient showed no signs of pain or dis¬ 
comfort, although the blinking of his eyes was evidence that 
he had not completely “gone under”—i. e., lost consciousness. 
A few whiffs of ethylene had desensitized the dog. He 
remained conscious, but the valves that connected his nerves 
with their control centers had been closed. The dog had 
been operated on successfully, safely, and without pain. 

One more semi-final experiment. A dog was kept under 
the torpor of ethylene for forty-five minute periods, fifteen 
times in three weeks. On each occasion his tail would wag 
with canine pleasure two minutes after the mask had been 
removed. Three minutes later he was playing around in the 
manner common to dogs in a state of well-being. He ate 
heartily of the best dog food and took on six and one-half 
pounds of weight during the three weeks of experimentation. 

The time had now come for the test that no longer involved 
merely the success or failure of a theory, or the lives of labor- 


118 



THE STORY OF ETHYLENE 


atory animals, but the life of a human being. The marked 
success with the tests on lower forms of life suggested the 
feasibility of applying the anaesthetic to man. But man had 
changed in a thousand respects during his evolutionary journey, 
especially in his brain and nervous system. The effect of the 
gas might be the same on a man as it had been on the dog— 
then again, it might not. 

Who would volunteer his life for a cause that did not promise 
monetary compensation, patriotic glory, medals, and showers 
of confetti? Luckhardt and Carter faced each other silently 
in their deserted laboratory. It was Sunday. The decision 
was quickly made. It is unlikely that any eloquent words 
were exchanged between them. Luckhardt was ten years older 
than Carter. He had a wife and three children .... 
The younger man submitted to the test first. 

Carter lay down on the couch, holding his right arm up 
in the air. The mechanical procedure was familiar to both 
of them. Whether anything more dramatic happened in this 
stage setting than in the one with the animals will never be 
known. Both men were cool-headed scientists. 

Together they adjusted the mask. Luckhardt signified that 
he was about to administer the gas, and Carter took a few 
deep breaths. His extended arm lost its rigidity and fell half¬ 
way to the couch; but he shot it up again. Another few breaths, 
and the arm dropped—all the way, this time. Carter was 
unconscious. 

Luckhardt stopped the flow of gas and tore the mask from 


119 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


his assistant’s face. A few seconds later, Carter was on his 
feet, his head clear, his body fresh, asking Luckhardt why he 
did not proceed with the experiment. The ethylene had done 
its work marvelously. The whole test had required little more 
than a minute, and had left the subject so free from discomfort 
and nausea that he did not know it had taken place. 

It was Luckhardt’s turn now. This time, the younger man 
administered the anaesthetic. The physiologist inhaled the 
gas. It had a faintly sweetish odor. A pain in his forehead 
that had been troubling him disappeared and he felt a moderate 
exhilaration just before he grew unconscious. That was all. 

Carter checked the gas and unmasked his subject. In a 
moment the limp body was a vigorous man again. He was 
delighted with the effect of the experiment upon himself. 
Ethylene was harmless, as well as potent. The two men, re¬ 
joicing, made their way to the office of Anton Julius Carlson. 

Dr. Carlson was their chief—the head of the department of 
physiology at the University. He knew something of the 
experimentation with ethylene, but, with true scientific skep¬ 
ticism, he was dubious of its possibilities. His first reaction 
was one that stimulates progress: he doubted, and wanted 
to be “shown.” 

Carlson was a strong man, larger than either Luckhardt or 
Carter. He offered to explode their conclusion by resisting 
the gas himself. The knotty figure of the Scandinavian soon 
lay on the laboratory couch. His powerful arm, with the pon¬ 
derous fist tightly clenched, was held vertically above him. 


120 



THE STORY OF ETHYLENE 


He did not know that the experiment was over when he 
sat up and listened to the story of the two men. When they 
assured him that his arm had fallen a few seconds after the 
application of the gas, he accused them, in his droll way, of 
trying to deceive him. He knew that he had never lost con¬ 
sciousness. But on Luckhardt’s solemn insistence that he had, 
he acknowledged his lapse, in wonder. 

During their earlier tests with dogs, the scientists had learned 
that ethylene worked faster and more effectively than laughing 
gas or ether, the two common anaesthetics. It was clearly less 
dangerous in use than the other two gases, since it was non¬ 
toxic and could be utilized freely in the case of patients with 
weak hearts or lungs, or diseased kidneys. Both ether and 
laughing gas had after-effects that were not only unpleasant 
but frequently fatal to patients in a very weak condition. 

It was not long before Luckhardt and Carter by further 
experiments—volunteers were numerous now—proved to their 
complete satisfaction that a human being felt no more pain 
from pin pricks or blows, under the magic spell of ethylene, 
than did a dog. They were ready for a clinical demonstration. 

While noted surgeons and anaestheticians looked on, Luck¬ 
hardt again submitted himself to a test. It was completely 
successful; the efficacy and speed of the demonstration bewil¬ 
dered the men of medicine. Ethylene was ready for the 
world’s use. 

The first operation in which ethylene was used professionally 
took place at the Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago, in the 


121 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


spring of 1923. With a combination of 85 per cent ethylene 
and 15 per cent oxygen, a surgical case of the sort that had 
served to introduce ether, generations earlier, went under the 
knife. It was the removal of a scalp tumor. 

Both surgery and gas functioned perfectly. More serious 
operations were then undertaken with the assistance of ethylene, 
and in every instance most satisfactory results were achieved. 

During the eight years since ethylene’s debut as a sub¬ 
stitute for ether and laughing gas it has relieved human 
suffering to an incalculable extent. Whereas injuries associated 
with the use of ether had mounted to over 100 a year, ethylene 
has been utilized in more than half a million operations, with 
only twelve mishaps on record since its introduction. Of the 
500,000 patients, only three died through accidents resulting 
from the use of the anaesthetic. 

The cause of nearly all the mishaps with ethylene has been 
its inflammability—a characteristic that it shares with ether. 
And the very few black marks against ethylene have been due 
to the carelessness of attendants in the operating room. The 
fault is in the human equation rather than in the gas and 
its consequences. 

Ethylene is without question one of the greatest blessings 
that science has ever given to suffering humanity. Perhaps 
Luckhardt has forgotten the Sunday morning when he and 
Carter faced each other in the laboratory. It takes unscientific 
sentiment to make romance of such occasions. 


122 



Chapter III 


MICE TELL US ABOUT CANCER 

W HY should anyone want to live with 10,000 mice? 

Maud Slye’s answer is terse: These 10,000 mice, and 
their 100 generations of 75,000 ancestors, offer man by their 
example a possible means of liberation from the most vicious 
of all modern scourges—cancer. 

Its cause unknown, its cure undiscovered, cancer, claiming 
the lives of 100,000 men and women each year in the United 
States alone, has increased at a tremendous rate, in the face 
of medicine’s success against almost all other major diseases. 
All that anyone seems to know of cancer is that it enters man’s 
body starkly and boldly, and leads him to agonizing death. 

Miss Slye’s twenty years of study of a city of mice—a city 
of heterogeneous mice, some healthy, some ailing, all living 
and dying much in the manner of generations and cities of men 
—have made three vital contributions to the war against cancer. 
They are: (l) Susceptibility to cancer is definitely inherited; 
(2) Cancer is not a germ disease; (3) Cancer can be bred 
out of, or eliminated from, the human race in two generations. 

This remarkable woman has never bothered to write a thesis 
for a Ph.D. degree, nor to stand examination for the M.D. 


123 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


So she is not “Dr.” Slye. But she is a professor at the Uni¬ 
versity of Chicago, and has lived there all these years in the 
midst of her city of mice. 

Her laboratory is not one of those stately buildings that 
suffuse the campus with their Gothic beauty. It is an aban¬ 
doned two-story flat building on the edge of the quadrangles, 
unobserved by the visitors who explore the more inspiring halls 
of knowledge and research. To be sure, passers-by are some¬ 
times attracted by the sign “Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial 
Institute Laboratory” and by the decrepitude of the structure 
itself. But if they approach closely enough their curiosity 
is apt to be dissipated by the noticeable stench that hovers 
about the place, and they go their way. 

Inside, the woman whose first childhood pets were a pair 
of white mice is at work among her cages full of carefully 
registered rodents. The ten thousand have sprung from twenty 
original specimens that Miss Slye collected in her girlhood days 
at the university. The family tree of each one of them is 
recorded, with all the characteristics that have appeared in 
its ancestry for twenty years. 

Mice are mammals, and their disease problems closely 
approximate human disease problems. What is more impor¬ 
tant is that their cancers are almost identical with those of 
man, in type, in the organs involved, and in clinical behavior 
and development. And it fortunately happens that since the 
average life of a mouse is only some six months, countless 
generations of them can be studied during the lifetime of one 


124 



MICE TELL US ABOUT CANCER 


worker. These are the reasons why Miss Slye chose to work 
with mice. 

The rodents that are making this great page in medical 
history have not been selected because of their ailments or 
susceptibility to disease; nor are they a collection of extraor¬ 
dinarily healthy animals. They are, as far as their physical 
condition goes, just individuals representing a cross-section 
of the world of mice. 

In all the cases of cancerous specimens studied by Miss 
Slye—and there have been more than 5,000—cancer has never 
been induced by artificial means. The cases that occur among 
the inmates of her laboratory are spontaneous, arising in the 
natural life of the animals, just as man’s cancers arise. Thus 
the problem presented in the growth of cancer among mice 
involves exactly the same factors that exist in human cancer. 

Cancer is a malignant and generally fatal abnormal growth 
of tissue, in which metabolism—the development and multipli¬ 
cation of cells—goes on at an amazingly rapid rate. It has 
been possible sometimes to retard the growth, but attempts 
to cure it completely have resulted in failure. It is a horrifying 
fact that incurable is a dictionary synonym of cancerous . 

The basic result of this unique “mouse lady’s” efforts em¬ 
bodies the principle that susceptibility or predisposition to 
cancer, and immunity or exemption from cancer, are hereditary, 
in accordance with the Mendelian law of inherited character¬ 
istics. Miss Slye has not found the disease itself to be either 
hereditary or contagious. 


125 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Heredity, a phenomenon that we all endorse with the 
exclamation “Blood will tell!”, is one of the most basic of all 
biological facts playing a role in the process of evolution. 

Gregor Mendel formulated the laws of the action of inherited 
characteristics. In 1865 he hybridized, or “mixed,” a number 
of varieties of cultivated peas and presented an analysis of 
his results before an obscure local scientific society in Austria, 
his native country. His work was lost for many years, unfor¬ 
tunately, and the rediscovery, in 1900, of his epochal disserta¬ 
tion marked the beginning of scientific genetics. Subsequent 
application of his theory to lower animals and humans indicated 
that the rules of heredity hold throughout the plant and 
animal kingdoms. 

The Mendelian theory, pruned of all its technical trimmings, 
asserts that when two organisms, differing in a single unit 
character, mate, their offspring will show one character 
expression to the total exclusion of the other. 

Thus, a pure black guinea pig, when mated with a pure 
white guinea pig, will have none but black offspring. The 
character difference which appears in this first generation of 
offspring is known as the dominant. The character which 
fails to appear is termed the recessive. If the first generation 
of black hybrids is interbred, lo! the white, or recessive, appears 
in the next generation, in the definite ratio of three blacks to 
one white. Thus, in the third generation, we have three 
dominants to one recessive. 

Now, when the recessives, or white guinea pigs, of this third 


126 



MICE TELL US ABOUT CANCER 


generation are interbred, they produce nothing but white, or 
recessive, offspring, while the interbreeding of the dominants 
of the third generation gives mixed results. One out of three 
of these dominants, or blacks, will, when crossed with a white, 
give all black offspring; the other two, when crossed with a 
white, produce half black and half white offspring. 

In harmony with this law, Miss Slye found that inheritable 
exemption from cancer was a dominant characteristic, while 
susceptibility was a recessive. In her own words: 

“If a non-cancerous mouse is mated with a cancerous one, 
no susceptibility to cancer is found in the first generation of off¬ 
spring. Then mate two of these hybrid cancer-resistant mice; 
what do you get? In this second generation of offspring the 
recessive appears—one-fourth of the mice are susceptible to 
cancer. One-fourth of the brood are cancer-resistant, and one- 
half are animals which are resistant to cancer themselves, but 
which can transmit the disease. 

“Although a mouse—or a human being, for that matter 
—may inherit the tendency to have cancer, the disease prob¬ 
ably will not appear except under favorable (favorable to the 
development of the disease, that is) conditions. The fact that 
the tendency is inherited doesn’t mean that the individual in 
question will inevitably be afflicted by cancer. These so- 
called ‘favorable’ conditions consist of chronic irritations, such 
as non-healing wounds or sores, the presence of bacteria caus¬ 
ing wounds that do not heal, or continued chronic pressure— 
such as from a broken or malplaced tooth in a jaw. 


127 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


“But the tendency not to have cancer is also hereditable, 
and by proper selection of parent animals it is possible to 
eliminate cancer entirely. Experimental work with mice has 
proved it to be a fact, and the same principles that apply to 
mice apply to human beings. I have worked with cancer of 
the breast, spine, lung, kidney, tongue, mouth, stomach, and 
all the other common types of the disease that are prevalent 
in the human race. 

“It has proved possible to eliminate this scourge from families 
of mice originally 100 per cent cancerous. By mating these 
first generation hybrids that do not have cancer themselves, 
but one of whose ancestral families was 100 per cent cancerous, 
with cancer-free mice, I have been able to rule out all suscepti¬ 
bility in the family for many generations. I have bred twenty- 
five generations of these cancer-free hybrids who are descended 
from a 100 per cent cancerous family, and the disease has 
never appeared. But as soon as one of these hybrids is mixed 
with another of the same type, instead of with a cancer-free 
mouse, the disease appears. 

“Translated into terms of human experience, this means 
that if the findings in regard to the heredity of malignant dis¬ 
eases in mice should prove to hold for man (and every biolog¬ 
ical fact at our disposal indicates that they do), cancer, the dis¬ 
ease that accounts for at least 10 per cent of the deaths of persons 
who have lived to the ‘cancer age’ of fifty, can be eliminated 
from the human stock by two generations of genetic mating. 

“Many persons, at first thought, are doubtless alarmed at 


128 



MICE TELL US ABOUT CANCER 


the statement that cancer is hereditable. But instead of being 
alarming, the fact that cancer is hereditable should be extremely 
gratifying. It means that the disease can be eliminated if the 
time ever comes when men and women are willing to subject 
their own temporal happiness to the eternal benefit of the race.” 

Her belief in the futility of the search for the “cancer germ” 
Miss Slye explains by the established fact that the growth 
of cancer in human beings, as well as in mice, makes no early 
changes in the afflicted individual’s system. 

“Often mice in my laboratory have cancers larger and heavier 
than the rest of their bodies without evidencing changes in 
their systems,” the “mouse lady” tells us. “Only when the 
cancer breaks down from lack of blood supply and becomes 
infected from some outside source, or when it grows in a blood 
vessel and causes fatal hemorrhage, or fills some organ and 
disrupts its function—such as breathing or digestion—only 
then do the symptoms of systemic illness appear. 

“No germ disease we know behaves this way. Germs cause 
early and widespread systemic reactions. In both the human 
and the lower animal, body cancer, as is well known, does not 
usually make itself apparent until it is in a rather advanced con¬ 
dition. I cannot believe that this would be the case if cancer 
is traceable to a specific germ.” 

Here, then, is Maud Slye’s humanitarian contribution. Be¬ 
sides proving the vital facts as to the heredity of cancer itself 
and the transmission of susceptibility to and exemption from 
the disease, she has concluded that cancer-free persons who 


129 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


mate will have non-cancerous offspring. These results were 
obtained with unfailing effectiveness in her mice. They will 
be equally sure, it would seem, in human beings. 

Miss Slye has shown how mankind can weed out cancer. 
No trumpets and brass bands announced her discovery, but 
it is none the less one of the most momentous in humankind’s 
long struggle against disease. 


130 



Chapter IV 


HUNGER—FOR FOOD AND FOR FACTS 

F REDERICK HOELZEL’S appetite for hardware is 
neither a natural propensity nor an abnormal craving. It 
is a deliberate achievement whose purpose is the furtherance 
of knowledge. Mr. Hoelzel is a scientist, though he is not a 
professor and has no academic rating. Indeed, he never at¬ 
tended college. But he has devoted his life thus far to 
science so earnestly and fruitfully that the giants of science 
call him one of their own, and he works with them in a uni¬ 
versity laboratory. 

Hoelzel’s main interest is the study of physical subsistence. 
To the labyrinthine search for facts about hunger and thirst 
he has given his own body in experimentation. For a score 
of years he has been a laboratory specimen at a large institution 
of the Middle West, always available, eager for any test in 
which the advancement of science and the betterment of life 
are involved. 

Do not imagine him to be a passive brute that may be led 
out of a cage, tested for reactions, and led back. Hoelzel is 
a strong, intelligent man. Having been associated with scien¬ 
tists since he reached maturity, he has imbibed a vast lore. 


131 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


His dietary activities of the last three years are the result 
of his own desire to experiment in his chosen field, and to 
provide mankind with facts regarding the rate of passage of 
different substances through the human body. 

Scientists have long known that such facts would be inval¬ 
uable. But how could they be obtained? Experimentation 
with lower animals would be of small use, since the alimentary 
and digestive system of man differs from that of all other 
animals. 

Hoelzel recognized the value to medicine and physiology 
of statistics bearing on the normal rate of progress made by 
material of different kinds through the esophagus, the stomach, 
and the intestines. Such knowledge would pave the way for 
a signal advance by science in its struggle with mankind’s physi¬ 
cal tribulations. It would mean a marked enhancement of 
man’s meager understanding of diet. Hoelzel was distinctly 
interested. 

A great university offered him a laboratory in which he might 
live as well as work, together with materials and equipment 
for his adventure. 

Some of the different forms of diet that he has adopted 
for purposes of experimentation have been extraordinary. For 
more than a year he has eaten every day from ten to twenty- 
five pellets of metal—about five grams a day—and one hundred 
little strands of knotted thread or twine. He has charted the 
progress of these objects through his system, recording their 
positions inside his alimentary tract by means of elaborate 


132 



HUNGER—FOR FOOD AND FOR FACTS 


X-ray photographs. He has also used other “inert” material 
of varying weights, such as glass beads, steel, gold, and rubber, 
for comparative purposes. 

No particle of these unique delicacies has ever disappeared 
to confuse his statistics and blur the accuracy and conclusiveness 
of his charts. As a general rule, glass makes the fastest time 
on its dark journey. Gold, heavier, sometimes requires as 
much as twenty-two days for completion of the route. The 
normal length of time consumed in the course of the alimentary 
tour is two days. 

Of course Hoelzel has also eaten a healthy man’s usual 
allowance of more digestible fare during this period. The 
test material is indissoluble. Therefore, it provides him with 
no nourishment whatever, but it preserves its identity during 
the whole course of the journey, and thus its movement can 
be studied. 

One of the fundamental purposes of the experimentation 
is to determine the rate of speed at which material is carried 
through the body by different types of food, different compre¬ 
hensive diets, and under varying conditions. While the results 
thus far are fragmentary, they indicate that under normal cir¬ 
cumstances there is a distinct variation in the speed at which 
different materials are carried through the body, and that as 
a rule, substances move at a rate inversely proportional to 
their specific gravity—heavier stuff moving more slowly. 

Hoelzel has never been troubled by indigestion, despite the 
general suspicion that green apples, pickles, and ice cream 


133 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


form a more sociable combination than glass beads and pieces 
of solid rubber. 

“Except once or twice,” he admits, “when I was foolish. Like 
the time I ate talcum powder. Or the time I ate sand. Or 
worse yet, the time I made a whole meal out of glass beads. 
Three hundred grams—over a thousand of them. I just mois¬ 
tened them, put a little salt on them, and ate them by the spoon¬ 
ful. I had an intestinal obstruction—they told me I was lucky 
to get out alive.” 

Hoelzel’s most revolutionary undertaking is less spectacular 
than some of the others. He has fasted, of his own accord, 
more than five hundred days, at different times, including a 
forty-two day abstinence from food. This latter record sets 
a mark for scientific starvation. For one thousand and one 
hours in the summer of 1925 he existed on water alone. 

He invented a non-nutritive flour, made principally of cellu¬ 
lose, that can be eaten by persons who for some reason or 
other must eschew their normal food to a certain extent. A 
meal of this kind gives the diner a “full” feeling, although 
it offers no nutrition at all. Its value to diabetic patients has 
provided Hoelzel with a steady income which has made him 
financially independent. 

A curious boy was Frederick Hoelzel when he came to 
America from Germany. He was not strong, and he suffered 
from digestive difficulties. He attended a high school in Chi¬ 
cago; his graduation from this institution completed the only 
formal education he received. 


134 



HUNGER—FOR FOOD AND FOR FACTS 


HoelzePs digestive troubles were not complicated, but they 
puzzled him deeply. While his companions simply cussed their 
“belly aches,” Hoelzel was wondering what effect a changed 
diet might have on the situation. This was the beginning of 
his experimentation. Soon he had ventured into physiological 
research beyond the depth of simple dietary adjustment. 

He obtained employment as a technician in the Anatomy 
Department of the University of Illinois, where he subjected 
himself to tests that were commonly given to lower animals. 

His interest in the human “works” rose like a rocket. The 
phenomena of mechanical reaction in a highly emotional ani¬ 
mal like man enthralled him. The predictability of lowered 
or increased energy and resistance under different conditions 
gave him as naive delight as a youthful aviation enthusiast 
feels when a home-made plane makes a successful flight. His 
scope of experimentation broadened rapidly; the more severe the 
test, the more gratifying the successfully predicted results. 

Anton Julius Carlson, a master physiologist, had just pro¬ 
pounded a theory of hunger. The seat of hunger was then, 
as it is now, unknown. Carlson held that the sensation of 
hunger was specifically traceable to the automatic contraction 
of the walls of the empty stomach. As the stomach grew 
emptier, or continued empty, these contractions increased. 

HoelzePs self-experimentation led him to believe that hunger 
was due to a much more generalized condition than that of the 
stomach itself. He made bold to establish contact with Carlson 
and offer a contradictory theory. He believed that the condi- 


135 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


tion of the cells or tissues of the principal food reserve depots, 
such as the liver and the blood, are the major factors in hunger, 
and that this gastric contraction is only one phase of the phe¬ 
nomenon. 

Hoelzel volunteered to fast for an extended period in order 
to settle—so far as might be possible—the dispute. Carlson 
offered his cooperation, and the youth came to join him while 
carrying out the test. 

He fasted for fifteen days. Tests were made each day on 
the subject, but the results were not conclusive. Measurements 
of stomachal contraction were taken with the assistance of a 
balloon. This was inflated in his stomach, causing expan¬ 
sion as food does. The sensation of hunger did decrease, 
and this tended to substantiate Carlson’s theory. But as the 
experiment wore on, the contractions of the stomach dimin¬ 
ished. So the problem has not yet been settled. 

That experiment, however, started Hoelzel off on his extraor¬ 
dinary fasting marathons. On May 27, 1925, he undertook 
to outfast a man named Levanzin, who had pulled body and 
soul through a thirty-one day abstinence in the course of re¬ 
search carried on under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution. 

Hoelzel had previously fasted for fifteen days on several 
occasions. He had found that the fast seemed to rejuvenate 
him, but that its magical results were short-lived; that soon 
after his return to normal life, when the immediate effects of the 
experiment had worn off, the level of his energy was reduced 
to below normal. 


136 



HUNGER—FOR FOOD AND FOR FACTS 


Hoelzel fasted thirty-three days in this record effort. His 
diary of those thirty-three days contains some pungent lines. 
It shows that he lived a normal life, reading, going to theaters, 
walking four or five miles a day, and studying. 

In the beginning, the sensation of hunger did not trouble 
him a great deal; toward the end, food became the only real 
interest in life. By the seventh day, he had lost ten pounds; 
by the thirty-third, he had lost thirty. The sense of smell sharp¬ 
ened; odors, especially meat odors, became more attractive than 
anything else in life. 

He broke his fast on the thirty-third day, with the juice of 
an orange, following it in half an hour with a whole orange, 
then one and a half pints of red raspberries with half a pint 
of cream. This was capped with three-quarters of a pound 
of porterhouse steak, fried. 

Then what? 

The man who had eaten nothing from May 27, to June 30, 
feasted ravenously for thirty-three days together. Thirty-four 
days after the first day of his feasting he began another fast. 

This fast was epochal. It lasted nearly forty-two days—one 
thousand and one hours. The story of this second starvation 
almost duplicates the first. This time he attended fewer movies 
and vaudeville shows, and spent more time reading. His walk¬ 
ing he maintained at the rate of four to six miles a day. 

“Gradually,” he says, “I got tired of reading stories and 
jokes, and near the end of the fast found myself turning me¬ 
chanically to the recipe section or food advertisements of every 


137 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


magazine I picked up. I took my long walks, but they came 
to be miserably disappointing if I didn’t come close enough 
to half a dozen restaurants to see the food in the windows and 
smell the frying. What did I do? Oh, nothing much. 
Gradually lost interest in things.” 

HoelzePs weight dropped from 144 to 107 pounds during 
this second fast. He had lost thirty pounds as a result of the 
first. He gained six pounds after his first meal following 
the former fast, but he lost four pounds of this by the next 
morning. Between the fasts a typical feast included two pounds 
of meat or fish, one pint of cream, half a pound of butter, 
one and a half pounds of tomatoes or greens, two or three 
pounds of fruit, some sugar, chocolate, honey, and coffee. 
And this repast did not spoil his appetite. On the eighth day 
of scientific gorging he had regained twenty pounds, and when 
he got off to his second fast he weighed four pounds more 
than he had at the outset of the first. 

Fasting, Hoelzel has decided, after a stomachful of it, is, 
generally speaking, futile. Its immediate results are exhilarat¬ 
ing, but in the long run it gets one—as in a two-mile race 
around a quarter-mile track—just nowhere. 

“I used to think fasting was a sort of cure-all,” Hoelzel 
concludes. “But now I think its effects—its good effects—are 
temporary. It is obvious, although we overlook the fact in 
the hustle and bustle of the lay life, that a man in fasting be¬ 
comes a cannibal. He consumes his own flesh. He lives on it. 

“This tumultuous change from a food ration that contains 


138 



HUNGER—FOR FOOD AND FOR FACTS 


vegetables and carbohydrates to one of meat alone momen¬ 
tarily energizes a person, but the eventuation of the whole 
business is a recession to the original state, and a tremendous 
depletion of energy has occurred in the meanwhile. 

“Fasting to reduce establishes itself in this category of merry- 
go-round futility. The immediate results may be a kind of 
mental and physical exhilaration, an I-feel-twenty-years- 
younger sensation, and a modish emaciation accompanies the 
rewards. But the frame and the tissue will demand their 
pounds of flesh, and the tonnage will come back. When the 
exhilaration wears off, the decline to normality is attributed 
to a mistake in choice of diets. But I’ve tried them all— 
they’re useless.” 

Whether or not the medical profession entirely agrees with 
HoelzePs conclusions, he has made a valuable contribution to 
our knowledge in a little-understood field. He has earned a 
certain glory—whatever its worth may be. He has fasted 
to end fasting. He has taken his own body and given it to 
another quest for scientific knowledge. And, with a spoonful 
of glass beads (with a little salt), he toasts the health of the 
human race. 


139 



Chapter V 


THE ART OF DOING NOTHING 

D OING nothing,” as the physiologist understands the 
phrase, involves the expenditure of the smallest amount 
of energy necessary for the sustenance of life. This means the 
complete relaxation of all muscles that are not integral with 
the basic functions that cleanse the blood and send it through 
the body, together with those more or less self-actuating func¬ 
tions essential to the living state. 

Man is the slave of habits and emotions that have been accu¬ 
mulating through the ages. He no longer knows how to 
relax completely, even if such knowledge were once his. Left 
to his own devices, the modern man no longer understands how, 
by relaxation, to conserve his energy, to induce sleep, and to 
rejuvenate his nervous system. But science, in answer to man’s 
unvoiced plea for guidance in the dark, is beginning to teach 
him the technique of complete relaxation. 

Fired by the belief that such relaxation may prove to be the 
basis of important medical treatment, Dr. Edmund Jacobson, 
who was trained at Harvard and Rush Medical College, has 
tackled this problem. His investigations have already shown 
that relaxation not only facilitates the cure of nervous diseases, 


140 


THE ART OF DOING NOTHING 


but also raises the “body tone”—the vigor and zest with which 
the healthy man is equipped to face the day’s work. In addi¬ 
tion, relaxation has been shown to play an important part in 
the reduction of actual pain. 

Dr. Jacobson’s patient lies on his back in a fairly quiet 
room and is taught how to relax, one by one, the various muscle- 
groups of his body. After a reasonable time, the patient ac¬ 
quires the technique of relaxing them all simultaneously. 

The simplest method of training a person to relax is to have 
him flex one arm against resistance offered by the experimenter, 
while the subject notes the sensation of tenseness in his flexor 
muscles. By such a simple exercise, he becomes familiar with 
the experience of tenseness, and learns to recognize it and 
localize it when it appears anywhere in his body. He also makes 
a discovery that is fairly obvious—that relaxation is the nega¬ 
tive of holding tense, and can be successfully effected only 
when effort is completely avoided. 

This whole procedure sounds as easy as walking downstairs. 
But it requires training, none the less. Complete relaxation 
of a muscle-group, even by one who has had some practice in 
the art, does not occur instantly upon application of the in¬ 
tention to relax. Dr. Jacobson finds that it may require fifteen 
minutes, or even longer, for consummation. Daily practice 
periods of about an hour are recommended for mastery of the 
art of doing nothing. 

In the treatment of certain disorders, Dr. Jacobson finds 
that the patient’s training is but half completed when he has 


141 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


learned to relax lying down. His higher education involves 
the achievement of perfect muscular limpness in the sitting 
posture. And finally the patient is trained in relaxation while 
engaged in such activities as reading and writing. 

Under the latter conditions, it is patent that relaxation can¬ 
not be complete. For the hands must continue to hold the 
book or move the pen, the eyes must follow the words, and the 
back must maintain a certain erectness. But while certain 
muscles must be somewhat tense during these activities, it is 
still possible to avoid a superfluous amount of tension in them. 
And at the same time it is possible to relax such other muscles 
as are not indispensable to the prosecution of the activities in 
question. In this way an economy of nervous or muscular 
energy can be achieved; and this is of considerable importance 
in alleviating disability and fatigue as well as nervous irritability 
and excitement. 

A few years ago tests were made by Dr. Jacobson with a 
sudden and painful electric shock applied to the finger-tips of 
the subject. The natural reaction to this, of course, is to 
withdraw the hand hastily. Every subject withdrew his hand 
sharply when lying on a couch in the state that is ordinarily 
termed relaxation. But during the perfect relaxation induced 
by the method of training described, the haste of withdrawal 
was greatly diminished, while the sense of pain and unpleasant 
shock was often altogether absent. 

In a series of tests Dr. Jacobson found that one subject who 
was most proficient in relaxation failed to show any movement 


142 



THE ART OF DOING NOTHING 


of withdrawal of the hand in 96 per cent of the instances of 
electric shock. It seemed to this subject incredible that the 
electric current producing such slight stimulation was not 
weaker than the one which had produced pain. 

These responses lend confirmation to the theory that even 
pain may be much mitigated by this simple therapy. 

When the normal individual lies down to sleep, his muscles 
automatically relax to a certain extent, as if he had unloosed 
his grip on the taut reins of many horses. The gross tensions 
of the external muscles are likely to subside within a few min¬ 
utes. More gradually the finer tensions of eyes, speech-organs, 
and other muscle-groups engaged in activities of thinking and 
emotion, attain to a similar limp composure. Sleep sets in 
only when a certain stage of relaxation is reached, depending 
no doubt largely upon the amount of fatigue substances in 
the blood and tissues. 

But if the individual has been unduly tense during the day, 
the degree of relaxation necessary for sleep may fail to appear. 
Then he is likely to toss about, while his mind remains active 
far into the night. And since the nervous system is delicately 
susceptible to habit, and inclines to repeat a process that has 
occurred once or twice, the condition of insomnia tends to 
recur. For the treatment of this condition, the cultivation of 
muscular repose has been found most effective. 

Can a man think when he is scientifically relaxed? Dr. 
Jacobson believes not. His subjects report a gradual fading 
of mental images as relaxation proceeds. 


143 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


In order to eliminate the chance of human error in this 
problem the physiologist constructed what is probably the 
most sensitive instrument for detecting the natural electrical 
currents of the body that has ever been made. 

He sank electrodes into the right biceps of a completely 
relaxed subject. At a predetermined signal the subject imagined 
himself throwing a baseball twice. No movement of the arm 
was visible to the investigator’s eye, but the delicate instrument 
recorded the fact that at the moment the signal was given two 
“action currents”—not more than a few millionths of a volt each 
—surged in succession through the biceps. 

With the electrodes attached to the organs of speech the 
instrument discovered specific but almost infinitesimal muscle 
tensions when the subject was thinking in terms of words. With 
the electrodes fitted over the eyes there was recorded delicate 
tension in the eye muscles when the subject summoned up a 
mental picture. 

“We think through our muscles,” says Dr. Jacobson. 

Dr. Jacobson’s research extends also to the emotions and their 
control. He is convinced that the emotions may be con¬ 
trolled by the application of the same principles that govern 
muscular relaxation. Two psychologists of the nineteenth 
century asserted that muscular reaction is the handmaiden of 
emotional reaction; that whenever the latter occurs, the former 
will be manifest in some form or other. Experimentation by 
Dr. Jacobson in his correlative study of the two phenomena 
has attested the truth of this hypothesis. 


144 



THE ART OF DOING NOTHING 


An important discovery by science is that lying physically 
still in bed is not necessarily resting. Just as obscure muscle- 
groups may remain tense or flutter during apparent composure 
and even during sleep, so may the emotions be reducing an 
individual’s energy in the very moments when he believes that 
“resting” is reviving his storehouse of power. 

In one interesting experiment, Dr. Jacobson examined in de¬ 
tail the effects of emotional stimulations on the human esopha¬ 
gus—the muscular tube which carries food from the mouth 
to the stomach. 

Tenseness of the muscles in the esophagus, as in other organs, 
causes the phenomena known as “spasms.” Such tenseness 
is often seriously detrimental to health and sometimes fatal, 
particularly in nervous or emotional individuals. 

In his effort to learn whether control of the emotions can 
allay these spasms of the esophagus, Dr. Jacobson had his sub¬ 
ject swallow a small rubber balloon, attached to a rubber tube 
which protruded from the mouth and ended in an instru¬ 
ment that produced a record of any change in the amount of air 
in the balloon. When lowered to a point midway in the 
esophagus, this balloon was slightly inflated. As the esophagus 
contracted with muscular tension, the balloon was compressed 
and air forced from the tube, making it possible to obtain a 
measure of the contractions and relaxations of the organ. 

Dr. Jacobson found that the esophagus responded by con¬ 
traction—a minor spasm—at the moment of slightest emotion. 
But when the subject was really frightened, the contraction was 


145 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


violent. During a protracted period of mild fear, the esophagus 
remained persistently tense along its entire course. Some of 
its contractions were much more delicate, although definitely 
noticeable; as, for example, when chimes in a tower a block 
away began to ring. A fly alighting on the nose of the subject, 
the whistling of a passer-by—both induced contraction. Even 
when the subject began to think about anything in particular, 
the esophagus contracted. 

In these experiments Dr. Jacobson has made a contribution 
to the relief of human ailments and the alleviation of pain. 
He has opened up paths of further fruitful investigation in 
many directions. 

The art of relaxation had become almost a lost art among 
us. Its cultivation in this restless age will go a long way toward 
eliminating many of our personal and social ills. 


146 



PART V 


Families of Wheat and Men 









Chapter I 


IS THE FAMILY DOOMED? 

T HE young science of sociology has stumbled upon a 
disturbing revelation—the decline of the family. 

We, who for centuries have regarded the family as the 
impregnable basis of human relationships, find it difficult to 
withdraw to a distance furnishing a perspective that enables 
us to study the family objectively. It is not easy to dissociate 
the scientific data of the family from the aura of sentiment 
and affection that the word itself implies. 

But the sociologist has done just that: he has collected his 
data in a dispassionate manner and has analyzed its significance 
in the light of the present resources of his science. 

The scope of sociology—the infant prodigy of the major 
sciences—is limited to a mere forty years of experience. Few 
of its investigations have borne as yet their expected fruit; few 
of its guarded predictions have had an opportunity to crystallize 
into actualities. Consequently, the sociologist—it is Professor 
William F. Ogburn, of the University of Chicago, in this 
instance—is hesitant to prophesy the ultimate results of the 
processes he now sees going on in society. 

Professor Ogburn knows, as the facts that he has gathered 


149 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


are convincing evidence, that the family has lost an enormous 
percentage of its functional importance since the turn of the 
century. But he does not presume to forecast the extinction 
of that venerable institution, nor does he predict that the alarm¬ 
ing rate at which the decline has gone on in the last fifty years 
will continue, nor that a reaction will set in and restore the fire¬ 
side to the dominance it once enjoyed. What he is interested in 
are the revelations, themselves, of existing conditions. 

Professor Ogbum, in a nation-wide survey of the functions 
that are generally attributed to the American family, finds 
that the institution, judged by its past record, has had seven 
active phases. They are: (l) affectional, (2) economic, 
(3) educational, (4) protective, (5) recreational, (6) family 
status, (7) religious. 

It is commonly assumed, without much definite confirmation 
by data, that some of these functions have declined in scope 
and significance as activities of the family. What has been 
the rate and extent of this decline? Is it still going on? Does 
it provide any immediate or particular menace to the institu¬ 
tion of family life? 

Dr. Ogburn’s investigation, dealing as it does with the 
common realities and values of modern life, presents the situa¬ 
tion, as it affects the family, concretely and comprehensively. 

To what extent, he asks, has the decline of the economic 
function of the family affected it? The statistics of some 
of the industries that compete with the handiwork of the 
home tell the story. 


150 



IS THE FAMILY DOOMED 


The output of bakeries in the United States increased 60 per 
cent from 1914 to 1925, while the population of the country 
increased less than 15 per cent. Obviously, the bakery is taking 
over the work of the family kitchen. 

And we are learning to live out of the tin can and the pre¬ 
serving jar. During this same period the number of persons 
engaged in canning and preserving fruits and vegetables out¬ 
side of the home—in food-product factories—increased 37 per 
cent, and the production of these factories increased 100 per 
cent, as compared with about a 15 per cent increase in the 
number of families. 

And what is happening around the family kitchen and 
dinner table? While the number of domestic servants, of 
whom cooks and butlers are an important division, failed to 
keep pace with the increase in population from 1900 to 1920, 
the number of waiters and waitresses in restaurants has increased 
four times as fast as the population during that period. 

In the same time restaurant keepers have increased 158 per 
cent and the urban population only 46 per cent. And the 
number of delicatessen dealers in the United States, in the ten 
years preceding 1920, multiplied three times as fast as the 
population. 

But other economic functions beside the preparation of food 
are being shifted to outside agencies. For instance, the number 
of launderers and laundresses employed privately decreased by 
one-quarter, while the work handled by public laundries was 
augmented 57 per cent from 1914 to 1925. 


151 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Despite the unparalleled growth of wealth since 1900, 
reflected in larger numbers of well-to-do families and high 
wages in general, the number of domestic servants of all kinds 
decreased 15 per cent in twenty years, while the number of 
families expanded about 30 per cent. 

Does this fact suggest that women have increasingly and 
more effectively taken their traditional place in the home? Just 
the opposite seems to be true. One out of every eleven 
married women in the United States was working for pay 
outside of the home in 1920—an increase of 100 per cent over 
the figures for thirty years before. 

Do these various statistics imply any serious deterioration in 
the integrity of the family? Does it really matter where the 
cooking and laundering are done? The layman may say, 
“By no means; these functions are all extrinsic to the funda¬ 
mental duties and pleasures of the home. How can they 
injuriously affect the rearing of children—the family’s primary 
obligation?” 

But the sociologist presents still hardier food for reflection. 
If the problems of food and laundry are inconsequential—if 
it is the educational and moral upbringing of the young wherein 
the home functions most vitally—Professor Ogburn asks us 
to consider the decline of this function through the increase 
in numbers and duties of those “substitute parents”—the 
teachers—into whose hands the training of children is being 
transferred increasingly every year. 

Since 1870, parents have tripled in number, but teachers 


152 



IS THE FAMILY DOOMED 


have increased sixfold. Teachers are taking children away* 
from their parents for longer periods of time—78 days of the 
year in 1870, on the average, but 136 days in 1926. And they 
are taking them at tenderer ages; one in six children now goes 
to school between the ages of five and six. These figures point 
unmistakably to a trend involving a decline of the family bond. 

The protection of the family by its members, particularly 
by the husband and father, and by the adults of the younger 
members, is a function long recognized as native to the institu¬ 
tion. Is this function also declining? Certainly it has been 
more and more shifted to the State in recent years. 

In 1920 there was one policeman, constable, sheriff, or 
detective for every 220 families in the United States, as com¬ 
pared with one for every 240 families ten years earlier. The 
total number of protectors furnished by the State—including 
soldiers, firemen, and inspectors—increased 70 per cent from 
1910 to 1920. 

The development of the juvenile court, compulsory education 
laws, and child labor legislation, further indicate the trend 
toward a greater child-protective function on the part of the 
State and a diminution of the parents’ responsibilities. This 
seems to Professor Ogburn to be an inescapable result of the 
increasing complexity of the modern urban environment. 

Another new adjustment of the protective function is 
demonstrated in the growth of insurance. In 1926 the amount 
of insurance in force, of all kinds, was thirty times as great 
as it was in 1870. 


153 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Formerly, grown-up children and adult relatives were a sort 
of insurance for old people and for the widow with children. 
But now there are fewer children, and they tend to scatter to 
the ends of the earth. This scattering of the members of the 
family, stimulated by the vast network of modern industry 
and transportation, is making a person more an individual and 
less a member of a family. 

With the decline in the functions of housekeeper and pro¬ 
vider, the contracting of marriage is becoming more and more 
widely a matter of love rather than of economic considerations; 
hence the important factor of family status is losing its hold. 

Many of the parents and all of the grandparents of the 
present generation remember when the family home was the 
center of recreation for the group. The members of the family 
participated in informal entertainment in front of the fireplace. 

At the present time, 20,000 moving picture houses in the 
United States draw an average weekly attendance of 5,000 
each. This means that 100,000,000 persons—five-sixths of the 
population of the United States—attend the “movies” each 
week. (Of course, the figures include many “repeaters.”) 

Today, 12,000,000 persons attend major league baseball 
games each year, while football attracts 25,000,000 spectators. 
Tennis has a following of 1,000,000, and golf is participated 
in by 4,000,000. 

Where formerly there were individual yards surrounding 
each home in which children might play, the emphasis now 
is on public recreation grounds. The parks and playgrounds 


154 



IS THE FAMILY DOOMED 


in 127 cities of the United States multiplied eight times between 
1880 and 1926. 

“The changes in the type of our dwellings are perhaps 
indicative as a sort of total summary of what is happening 
to our family life,” Professor Ogburn goes on to point out. 
“For we are living more and more in apartments. For instance, 
in 1928, from the records of building permits issued in the 
United States we learn that two-thirds of the families who will 
be occupying these homes are to live in apartments or flats, 
while only one-third are to live in single apartment houses. 
These apartments or flats in multi-family dwellings are small, 
with small rooms and diminutive kitchens, and without yards 
or outdoor play space.” 

Does this radical change imply decadence or moral decay? 
The sociologist does not think so. He believes that the family, 
although it obviously plays a much less important role in 
society than it formerly did, may be just as vigorous, just as 
sound in its reduced size and in the more limited spheres in 
which it functions. 

Is the individual any worse off because of the decline of the 
functions of the family? Not essentially. The functions have 
not disappeared; they simply are handled to better advantage 
by other agencies. 

Again, is the growth of divorce an indication of a serious 
weakening of the spirit of affection that ought to rule in the 
family? Probably not. There has been, it is reasonable to 
suppose, just as much unhappiness and incompatibility in the 

155 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


domestic circle during other eras as there is now; but it was 
borne in silence, largely because of the economic dependence 
of women in former times. With the removal of that handi¬ 
cap, marital discord seeks a remedy in the divorce courts. 

Of all the family functions, that of affection is least easily 
reduced to statistics. Here each individual must be his own 
sociologist. Professor Ogburn believes that the love that makes 
mortals forget that the world goes ’round may surpass in its 
bountiful values all the other functions of the family and 
palliate whatever ills these functions fall heir to. If this is in 
truth the perdurable state of nature, the family will survive 
the assaults of twentieth century civilization and the pessimists’ 
bleat of “What are we coming to?” can be changed to one of 
“When are we coming to?” 


156 



Chapter II 


DISH-WASHING AS A FINE ART 

T HE evening meal has been finished. The feminine head 
of the family taps on the table with a spoon and tries 
to catch the eyes of first one and then another of the group, 
with a glance that is at once plaintive and appealing. But 
the family is vegetating in the pleasant limbo of languidness 
that brings up the rear of a palatable dinner. 

It is a moment when their vigor is at a low ebb. It is a 
moment when the hand that rocks the cradle fails to rule even 
a segment of the world. The masculine head of the family 
is preoccupied with an after-dinner cigar. The son and the 
daughter are nonchalantly conversing about matters far re¬ 
moved from dirty dishes. 

But the dishes, as the inevitable aftermath of every meal in 
every home has verified, will not “do” themselves. The mother 
realizes it, with a sigh. Must it be forever woman’s lot to 
waste hours daily bending over the insatiable sink? Why 
cannot the dishes be removed from the table, carried to the 
kitchen, scraped, washed, dried, and consigned to their various 
shelves in a fraction of the time and motion usually spent upon 
them? Science says they can. 


157 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


Miss Nellie Vedder has come to the weary housewife’s 
rescue. She undertook the repetition of the dish-washing 
process every day for six months as part of an original investi¬ 
gation. Her findings formed the basis of a thesis for the 
Master of Arts degree at the University of Chicago. 

Carefully reproducing in the university’s home economics 
laboratory the conditions of a normal home of four persons, 
Miss Vedder went to work. She evolved three methods of 
dish-washing, the most leisurely of which requires 38 minutes 
and 8 seconds, with 1,954 motions; one woman doing all the 
work, from clearing the table to storing the dishes. By the 
use of the most rapid method, the process can be completed 
in 22 minutes and 31 seconds, with 1,015 motions. 

The other members of Miss Vedder’s theoretical family 
watch the panorama of an evening’s dish-washing spread before 
their interested eyes by an efficient scientist who has decided 
to hear the after-dinner radio program in the living-room 
instead of from the pantry. 

To begin with, a tea tray has been wheeled near the table, 
ready for action. As soon as the meal is ended, the dishes 
are passed to the scientific mother, who, with a few swift 
motions, scrapes them off as she stacks them on the tea tray. 
Then she deftly wheels the tea tray into the kitchen, where 
the dishes are subjected to a rapid cold rinse, after which they 
are washed in as hot water as the tap affords. 

The heat of this water should be at least 120 degrees, Fahren¬ 
heit. Soap flakes, rather than bar soap, are recommended. 


158 



DISH-WASHING AS A FINE ART 


The dishes are next placed in a round-type wire drainer, 
and boiling water from a tea kettle is poured over them for 
steam drying. Miss Vedder found that this natural method 
of drying is 100 per cent faster and more sanitary than the use 
of towels. 

If the tap water is at 160 degrees, it is unnecessary to heat 
water for drying purposes, and an ordinary sink-spray can 
be used. 

The handiworker will, it is assumed, have her materials 
immediately accessible; and, if she is right-handed, will adopt 
a rhythmical left-to-right method, with work-table on the left 
and shelves on the right of the sink. 

For the family that is so situated as to afford three sets of 
dishes—including cutlery and cooking ware—the custom of 
cleansing the whole day’s dishes at one sitting, or standing, is 
urged by the scientist. More than 500 motions and six minutes 
may thus be cut from the running-time of the three-way 
operation. 

The labor-saving advantages of a single preparation of 
materials, and the uninterrupted rhythm of the operator, 
account for the greater efficiency of this method. For aesthetic 
reasons, the collection of soiled dishes may be stored away in 
oven, cupboard, or handy shelf, out of sight until ready for 
the cleansing process. 

Although no comparative study of costs was made in the 
course of the experiments, Miss Vedder suggests the installa¬ 
tion of a moderate-priced, plumbed-in type of dish-rinsing 


159 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


machine. The record time of 22 minutes and 31 seconds was 
established with the assistance of this device. 

No subject is too humble to command the respectful attention 
of science. Through her experiments with the prosaic task of 
dish-washing, Miss Vedder has pushed along a step further 
the emancipation of woman from the burden of age-old 
drudgery. 


160 



Chapter III 


DISEASE-PROOF WHEAT 

V AST fields of wheat stretch away to the horizon— 
bearing the promise of a glorious harvest. An inde¬ 
fatigable parasite, invisible as the wind that flings it abroad, 
invades these smiling fields. Thousands of acres, millions of 
dollars, are lost. 

Just as the place of origin of wheat is unknown, so is the 
birthplace of its deadliest enemy. All that is known is this: 
where wheat is, there also is the killer—wheat rust. 

Wheat is the most important food of temperate climates, 
and next to rice the most widely used of all grains. The 
health of wheat is too vital to have escaped the attention of 
science. For a century the farmer and the scientist battled the 
insidious enemy, but for many years the foeman appeared 
to be insuperable. 

Man had waged a losing war—not toe-to-toe with his fellow 
man as the enemy, but against a tiny fungus, a shriveled, spongy 
dwarf of a degenerate race of plants. And man was about 
ready to admit defeat. Even scientists were nonplused. The 
wheat rust’s infinitesimal tentacles were countless, and they 
encircled the earth. The farmer, the merchant, the consumer, 


161 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


would all apparendy have to continue paying the bills of the 
wheat’s unwelcome guest. 

To be sure, if the wheat could manage to exist, after a fashion, 
the public purse could somehow bear the burden. But if the 
rust increased in virulence, it might devastate the granaries of 
the world, with a panic as the inevitable result. In 1891, 
Prussia alone had begged off the demon with $100,000,000 
as a temporary sop. Five or ten years like 1891 would be 
disastrous—and who knew when the blow might fall? 

In 1928 there came an unpretentious announcement from 
Minnesota, whose golden fields yielded the world’s finest 
grains: Rust had been conquered. “Humph!” murmured the 
doubters; the grip of the rust seemed unshakable. But the 
word had come from the University of Minnesota’s experi¬ 
mental farm, respected for its contributions to agriculture. 

Where was the evidence that the enemy had been laid low? 
It was not in the form of the dead bodies of the last of the 
wheat rust fungi; it was in the form of a new kind of wheat, 
the product of twelve years of forced evolution. 

It happens that plants are especially tractable to evolutionary 
promptings, a fact demonstrated many years ago by Luther 
Burbank. Hybridization of plants has stocked the earth with 
hundreds of succulent fruits and vegetables of new varieties, 
and garnished its gardens with gorgeous flowers which nature, 
unaided, might not have produced for aeons. This process was 
to furnish the effective weapon for the battle against wheat rust. 

The announcement from Minnesota gratified scientists, but 


162 



DISEASE-PROOF WHEAT 


it did not startle them; for they were familiar with the past 
accomplishments of Professor Herbert K. Hayes, expert in 
plant genetics, and of his associates at the institution’s Agri¬ 
cultural Experiment Station. 

Since 1900, Minnesota’s crop of spring wheat had risen 
from 50,000,000 to 80,000,000 bushels a year, and then had 
dropped to a low of 21,000,000 in 1927. Diversification and 
the transfer of thousands of acres from spring wheat to other 
grains and grasses in the interests of dairying were partly 
responsible for the drastic fall in wheat production, but the 
dominant factor was wheat rust. 

It was known that the barberry bush acted as host in one 
part of the life-cycle of the wheat rust. At first an effort was 
made to get rid of the barberry. But the rust learned to live 
without it. Moreover, the berries of the bush were useful in 
medicine. Clearly, the salvation of wheat could not be found 
in a hopeless direct struggle with rust. 

Why not, then, quit fighting rust itself, and produce a 
wheat that would do the fighting on its own account? If the 
enemy found itself confronted with a triple-armored wheat, 
would it not be compelled to call quits and retire from the field? 

The idea was excellent, but how could it be realized? Two 
of the vital factors involved in the problem were clothed in 
mystery. Science did not fully understand the process by 
which plants get their food, and the nature of the deadly 
power of rust was obscure. 

There was only one course open—to go at the task prag- 


163 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


matically. Science would ask no questions, but simply select 
the types of wheat that for some unknown reason most effec¬ 
tively resisted rust, mate these types for several generations, 
selecting and interbreeding the most rugged offspring in each 
family, and thus produce a wheat hardy enough to ward off 
the venomous parasite. 

Fungi are types of plants generally characterized by the 
inability to manufacture their own food. They must, therefore, 
obtain their sustenance from organic matter. Many are para¬ 
sitic on other living plants; others live on decaying vegetation. 

To the class of fungi belong molds, mildew, smut, mush¬ 
rooms, toadstools, puffballs, and rust. Some of them are 
neither nuisances nor poisons, while others are both. But most 
pernicious of the fungi tribe is this rust that saps the life of 
growing wheat. 

Some of the early stages of its life-cycle are spent on the 
barberry bush, which acts as both host and nursery. The 
rust organism produces spores—a type of reproductive or germ 
cell—and these spores are sometimes carried off by insects but 
are generally dispersed by the wind. Drifting through the air, 
they while away their brief childhood until, when they find a 
haven in the leaves of the ripening wheat, they have attained 
their deadly maturity. 

How does this tiny murderer do its work? Not in the 
manner of the crude assassin (though it actually kills some of 
the plant’s cells) but by means of the subtler strategy of 
starvation. 


164 



DISEASE-PROOF WHEAT 


Plants get their nourishment from three sources—the sun, 
the earth, and the air. The sunlight falling on its leaves unites 
the water taken from the earth with the carbon dioxide inhaled 
into the plant’s pores from the air. Thus the substances that 
we call carbohydrates—the plant’s food—are produced. The 
process is called photosynthesis. 

Precisely what happens when the sunlight falls on the plant’s 
leaves botanists and organic chemists do not know, though 
they know the result. If ever they learn how this magic 
process works they may be able to reproduce it in laboratories. 
Then plants would no longer be necessary, since the food 
products we obtain from them could be manufactured by arti¬ 
ficial means! 

Decades of research have revealed one significant fact about 
photosynthesis: it cannot take place unless a green-tinted stuff 
known as chlorophyll is present in the leaves. Fungi have no 
chlorophyll; thus photosynthesis—the direct manufacture of 
food—is impossible for them. So they attach themselves to 
living hosts, which, unable to repulse them, pay with their 
lives for their unwilling charity. 

The wheat rust infects the leaves of the blooming grain, 
bores into the tissue, and in some manner destroys the vitality 
of the leaves, so that white spots appear on their surface. These 
barren spots reduce the amount of surface of the living leaf 
that is exposed to the sun; consequently, photosynthesis is 
retarded, and the ailing stalk finds itself starving. 

In cases of extremely virulent infection, the plant is stunted 


165 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


or killed. The presence of rust invariably means that the 
grain will be decimated. What fruit the diseased stalk suc¬ 
ceeds in producing is shriveled and deprived of most of its 
food value for man. 

The Minnesota scientists bent themselves to the tedious, 
fumbling task of breeding a rust-resistant type of wheat. The 
project meant vigilantly watching, for years, thousands of stalks 
of mated wheat. A generation of wheat requires a season in 
which to mature, and the trial specimens could be interbred 
only once in a generation. Then there were statistics to be 
compiled—volumes upon volumes of unerring data, the life 
history of each specimen, the faults and advantages of each 
“cross.” 

Professor Hayes and his company of experimenters prepared 
their subjects for the test by planting the seeds of a stalk of 
wheat that had fared inordinately well in a field otherwise badly 
infested by rust. The fruit of these seeds was crossed with 
other desirable specimens. 

From the University’s Division of Plant Pathology, where 
the lame, the halt, and the blind among plants are studied 
and treated, a hatful of thriving, malignant rust spores were 
procured—the most virulent obtainable. Then the row of 
vigorous wheat—the progeny of the “cross”—was deliberately 
infected. The results were watched intently. 

When, at the end of the season, the crop was harvested, those 
plants that had weathered the barrage of infection with no 
damage, or with comparatively little, were again interbred. As 


166 



DISEASE-PROOF WHEAT 


this eugenic mating was repeated, year after year, with the 
healthiest stalks of each generation chosen to carry on the 
strain, a highly rust-resistant wheat slowly emerged. In these 
particular generations, all other qualities were disregarded. 

Then this rust-resistant variety—possibly quite undesirable 
in other respects—was crossed with the best available wheat, 
measured by crop characteristics and milling qualities. Such 
matters as stem stiffness, average yield, ease of harvesting and 
handling, entered into the category of “general desirability.” 

Under the Mendelian law of heredity (which was originally 
based on plant life but obtains in both the plant and animal 
kingdoms with equal predictability) the progeny of the first 
cross was all uniform. But in the second generation there 
occurred a recombination of the characters of the two parent 
plants, by which certain of the offspring combined the best 
features of each, the most desirable qualities of the two 
progenitors. 

About 1,000 of these choice products of the second genera¬ 
tion were designated as the parents of the third—but not until 
the entire second generation group had been exposed to a severe 
infection of the rust fungus. Again it was largely on the basis 
of rust resistance, in this secondary cycle, that the selected 
specimens were chosen; so that, while the essential qualities of 
fine wheat were being perpetuated from generation to genera¬ 
tion, it was this heroic, elusive rust-resistance that was being 
ingrained in the developing new strain. 

From the second through the fifth generation there were 


167 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


again selected the thousand stalks in each season that had best 
withstood the severe ordeal. At last the gulf had been bridged; 
all the attendant qualities of healthy, vibrant, life-giving cereal 
had been infused into the new stock. 

But the job was not yet done. Here were a lot of individual 
stalks of wheat, all of them—the cream of the fifth generation— 
endowed with quintessential features of the perfect, or near¬ 
perfect, grain. Each was a thoroughbred, each an aristocrat. 
But where was the new variety—the new single, specific variety? 
That had yet to be engendered. In the sixth generation, then, 
began the final separation of the peerless wheat—the incom¬ 
parable new variety. 

Before the chosen stalks were admitted to parenthood for 
the sixth generation, they were subjected to the most fiery test 
of all—the disease garden. In this testing-ground the plants 
proved their relative mettle in resisting all the other malignant 
enemies of wheat besides rust. Samples of the harvested grain 
were put through a milling and baking trial. For five more 
years the aspiring candidates were made to jump through the 
hoop, so to speak, the hoop being raised higher each time. 

In the sixth generation, the scientists had planted 200 strains 
of wheat; by the twelfth, the candidate strains were reduced 
to forty. Then came the climax of years of profound, unre¬ 
lenting research and experiment: one of these forty strains was 
to be selected for distribution to Minnesota farms, whence it 
would, if the hopes placed in it were realized, spread east and 
west across the plains of the United States, north to Canada, 


168 



DISEASE-PROOF WHEAT 


over the seas to South America, to Australia, and around the 
world. 

From the University experimental farm and its three sub¬ 
stations there were assembled thirty men. They constituted 
the jury—botanists, organic chemists, plant pathologists, agri¬ 
cultural experts, scientific wheat growers. They examined the 
forty specimens, heard the case of each one, its history, its 
merits. The forty grains represented the cream of forty noble 
families, refined through twelve generations of eugenic mating. 

The jury deliberated. The jury voted. A new wheat, the 
Supreme Marquis, as it was called, stepped out and was pre¬ 
sented to the world. It made good. And from its descendants 
still finer strains have been and are being bred by science. 


169 














PART VI 


Toward Understanding the Human Machine 



Chapter I 


TRANSPLANTING EYES 

W HAT is responsible for the strange ability of cer¬ 
tain fishes and amphibians to camouflage themselves 
by changing color? What takes place in the process? Most 
men are content to look at these phenomena admiringly, without 
feeling any great urge pounding in their breasts to understand 
the causes. 

In 1920 a young Austrian, Theodore Koppanyi—now a 
professor at Georgetown University—found himself fascinated 
by the problem and was thereby led into a field that had been 
practically forgotten since a time long before, when certain 
scientists had dabbled there unsuccessfully. This field was 
the transplantation of the eye. 

In his early physiological work, before winning the Ph.D. 
at the University of Vienna in 1923, Koppanyi devoted much 
of his time to a remarkable species of fish which turned dark 
when placed in a dark dish and pale when removed to a 
light one. The process was sometimes slow, the scientist ob¬ 
served, and sometimes astonishingly rapid, according to which 
type of the species was used. 

After some preliminary experimentation, he found that if 


173 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


he removed the eyes of the fish, or covered them with black 
cloth, the creature ceased to show an active adaptation to the 
color of the environment and assumed a uniformly dark— 
almost black—color which did not react to external stimuli. 

How were the eyes involved in this phenomenon? Koppanyi 
asked himself. To solve the problem, he decided to experiment 
with transplantation. Scientists had often attempted the trans¬ 
plantation of bodily organs, but with disappointing results. 
Not only did Koppanyi choose this difficult method but he se¬ 
lected for his work one of the most delicate organs in the body. 

Simple transplantation of skin had long been a familiar 
operation. Today, the grafting of skin, of tissue-investing 
bone, and of fatty tissues, is a common medical procedure. 

But transplantation of intact organs within a species or even 
an individual is not so easily accomplished; for the “taking of 
the graft,” which is the process of uniting the grafted portion 
with the “host,” depends upon its early vascularization. 

Vascularization is the establishment of a connection between 
the grafted tissue and the delicate ducts and vessels that will 
carry blood to it. If vascularization fails, the food of the 
graft is cut off and the graft itself starves and degenerates rap¬ 
idly, until it becomes an alien body simply pinned on to the 
host, serving no function whatever. The graft must receive 
nutrition almost immediately after it has been attached; other¬ 
wise it will quickly degenerate and die. It is obvious that vas¬ 
cularization of an organ presents more difficulties than that 
of a thin layer of tissue. 


174 



TRANSPLANTING EYES 


There are many other factors that operate seriously to pre¬ 
vent the successful “taking” of the graft. And yet, there exists 
in the body a marvelous regenerative power, such as that which 
makes possible the healing of wounds, and on which the 
scientist may count for aid. 

Koppanyi migrated to the United States, became affiliated 
with several universities in the East and in the Middle West, 
and forgot—for a time—his study of the adaptation of color 
to environment. But the grafting problem still fascinated him. 
With the cooperation of American physiologists, anatomists, 
and pathologists, he began a series of experiments. 

His immediate goal was the successful transplantation of 
an eye in a fish or an amphibian. But his dream, implicit in 
this undertaking, was the transplantation of the eye of a human 
being—an age-old, “impossible” medical objective. 

In modern physiological history countless attempts had been 
made to graft organs so that they might function usefully in 
the new settings. Few of these met with even temporary suc¬ 
cess. A significant technical innovation was introduced by 
Drs. Murphy and Carrel, who successfully established imme¬ 
diate blood supply for the grafts by suturing—or stitching—the 
blood vessels of the grafts to the blood vessels of the host. 
But Carrel, the leader in this line of experiment, failed to 
obtain satisfactory results even with this improved method, 
and he dropped the work for more promising research. 

Koppanyi, in his preliminary experiments in Europe, had 
achieved results which encouraged him to go ahead. As he 


175 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


progressed, he became convinced that the graft should not be 
attached to the host by artificial means. Other investigators 
confirmed him in this belief. 

He therefore relinquished all sutures, artificial compression, 
and the other devices employed to force graft and host together, 
relying solely upon the natural propensity of the graft to take 
root. He believed that by means of this technique the wound¬ 
healing and regeneration could be encouraged to proceed with¬ 
out having to overcome such artificial barriers as stitches. 

His first move was an attempt to transplant the eyes of young 
amphibians on to the necks of individuals of the same species. 
To his delight, he found that the transplanted eye-grafts not 
only “took,” but that they also regenerated a perfect retina 
and even an optic nerve. The regenerated optic nerve some¬ 
times grew into the nearest nerve tissue in the spinal column. 

So far, so good; the transplantation in itself was successful. 
But for Koppanyi it was a negative success. When he removed 
the normal eyes of the host, the transplanted eyes on the neck 
did not prevent the appearance of the dark color characteristics 
of the blind amphibians, nor did these animals evince any ability 
to adapt themselves to the color of their environment. A frog, 
for instance, apparently was unable to see by means of its trans¬ 
planted eyes. The eyes did not function. 

The only conclusion Koppanyi could draw from the experi¬ 
ment was that the chemical changes set up within the eye and 
transmitted through general nervous pathways were not re¬ 
sponsible for the phenomenon of color adaptation. This im- 


176 



TRANSPLANTING EYES 


plied that the color change was in some way related to the 
higher optical centers—to vision—and that the animal was 
unable to perform its mysterious trick when the eyes were in 
seats other than their original sockets. 

“When I undertook the next step in my investigations,” 
Koppanyi reported some time afterwards, “I could not help 
feeling a horror at my blasphemy and lack of reverence in 
that I dared to replant the eye into its natural environment, 
into the eye-socket or orbit, and had the audacity to expect, or 
at least to hope, that I might be able to establish a connec¬ 
tion between the visual receptors of the eye and the higher 
optical centers.” 

But he went ahead and performed the experiment on a large 
number of fishes and frogs. Just as he had ventured to sur¬ 
mise, the dark color of many of the blind animals disappeared 
about three months after the transplantation, and at about the 
same time they began to exhibit their lost ability to adapt them¬ 
selves to the color of their environment. 

Here was success—partial success, to be sure, for Koppanyi 
wanted to know not only if the faculty for color adaptation de¬ 
pended upon vision, and to what degree it depended, but just 
what the process of this baffling performance was. At last, 
however, he had a clue to a large problem. 

The results that he secured indicated strongly that not only 
color adaptation but also vision itself was restored by the re¬ 
planting of the eye in the eye-socket. 

Subsequent experiments confirmed this supposition. The 


177 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


animals with new eyes were harassed by lights—both weak and 
strong lights. To weak lights they began to show positive 
phototaxis—attraction by a light in the direction of that light. 
To strong lights they showed negative phototaxis or photo¬ 
phobia—movement away from the light. Positive phototaxis 
to weak light is typical of the normal members of the species 
that he tested, as is negative phototaxis in the case of powerful 
light. 

The animals with transplanted eyes succeeded in chasing 
and capturing prey with the efficiency of normal animals of 
their kind. Even if a glass jar was placed between the creature 
and its prey, both the operated individual and the normal 
specimen were able to aim unerringly toward the prey, whereas 
the blinded animals ignored it. 

Transplantation of the eye in fishes and frogs was now an 
experimental fact. But how about the higher orders of life— 
the mammals? Koppanyi chose the useful rat for his new 
research. He obtained successful results with this species also, 
although in a much smaller percentage of the cases than with 
fishes and frogs. The vision of blinded animals returned, and 
their severed optical nerves regenerated themselves. Still later 
he added a rabbit to the list of successful experiments. 

Koppanyi is not yet done. He is climbing up the hierarchy 
of life. But the scientist in him makes no rash predictions; he 
utters only a problematical “may” as to the future. “Trans¬ 
plantation of the eye, therefore, in every class of the vertebrate 
kingdom,” he says, “is a practicable procedure which may lead 
178 



TRANSPLANTING EYES 


to regeneration of the optic nerve and the recuperation of the 
vision.” 

As to the application of his methods to the human species, 
the man who has restored sight to blinded animals makes no 
predictions. Science treads softly—one step at a time. 


179 



Chapter II 


THINKING AS A CHEMICAL PROCESS 

B Y DEVISING and employing one of the most delicate 
machines ever contrived—a machine so sensitive that 
the energy used by a house-fly in climbing an inch of screen 
would break it—science has learned that thinking is a chemical 
process not a great deal more complicated than the transfor¬ 
mation of water into steam. To many this may be disturbing 
news in the light of the unquestioning reverence with which 
all ages, including our own, have regarded a gift which has 
assured to the human animal uncontested supremacy over the 
other creatures with which man shares the earth. 

The instrument was recently perfected for the purpose of 
his experiments by Dr. Ralph W. Gerard, physiologist at 
the University of Chicago. For several years, in America and 
abroad, he sought an apparatus that would register the heat 
produced by the impulse of a nerve. 

Many scientists during the last twenty-five years had be¬ 
lieved that the impulse which shoots through a nerve and causes 
a muscle to respond is the result of oxidation. 

Bodily oxidation occurs in breathing: oxygen is inhaled by 
the lungs and unites chemically with the constituents of the 


180 


THINKING AS A CHEMICAL PROCESS 


blood. There are two obvious results of this union: heat is 
produced, and so is carbon dioxide. The heat is necessary for 
life; the carbon dioxide is exhaled. To provide this heat, 
the food-stuffs in the body are burned, just as the “food-stuffs” 
of a piece of wood or paper are burned when they unite with 
oxygen, to produce a visible fire, concentrated heat, and carbon 
dioxide mingled with other gases and “soot” in the form of 
smoke. 

That oxidation is responsible for muscular energy was proved 
several years ago by Professors A. W. Hill of London and Otto 
Meyerhof of Berlin. Their significant discovery was rewarded 
with the Nobel prize. 

The energy for the contraction of a muscle was traced to a 
rapid breakdown of sugar into lactic acid (the acid of sour 
milk), a process that does not involve oxygen. The muscle was 
found to be restored to its normal energy level—ready for the 
next contraction—by the oxidation of one-fourth of this lactic 
acid, the other three-fourths being rebuilt into the sugar from 
which it originated. 

Corresponding to these two processes are two phases of heat 
production: an initial one which is independent of oxygen, and 
a later one which does not occur if oxygen is absent. In the 
absence of oxygen, oxidation cannot occur; the lactic acid accu¬ 
mulates, and the result is muscular impotence, or death. 

No proof was obtainable that any such chemical reactions as 
the consumption of oxygen and the production of carbon diox¬ 
ide are linked with nervous impulses, nor had experiment been 


181 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


able to record any production of heat during the activity of a 
nerve. 

Until the last century all that was known about the nervous 
system was that it consisted of combinations of single cells that 
send out a thread-like extension, over a meter long in the larger 
animals (the largest ordinary cells are less than a tenth of a 
millimeter in length), and that along this fiber was conveyed 
something which was able to induce marked changes in the 
organ with which it was connected. The only means of proving 
that a nerve—a bundle of thousands of these fibers connecting 
the brain and the spinal cord with a muscle or other organ— 
was alive was by observing that irritation of the nerve caused 
the muscle at the other end to jump. 

Many explanations had been advanced as to what the “some¬ 
thing” was that traveled down the nerve, and how a stimulation 
at one end could produce an effect at the other. Nerves were 
regarded variously as mechanical ropes, such as a bell-pull, as 
pipes carrying a stimulating fluid, as conductors of energy waves 
acting as a column of water does in transmitting a vibration, and 
as conductors of electricity. 

Nearly all theories regarded the nerve as a sort of elevator 
shaft—a passive instrument that allowed energy or substance 
applied at one end to reach the other. 

Three-quarters of a century ago the momentous discovery 
was made that when a nerve is active, a wave of electric charge 
passes along its length, though not as an electric current is 
carried along a wire, since the speed of the nerve charge was 


182 



THINKING AS A CHEMICAL PROCESS 


only 120 meters a second in man—incomparably slower than 
that of electricity. Each part of the nerve appeared to produce 
its own electricity. 

A little later it was observed that there was a lapse of one 
one-thousandth of a second between these electrical impulses. 
There followed on this revelation the discovery that when a 
nerve was deprived of oxygen it gradually lost its power to 
conduct a stimulus. 

Science saw in these facts an indication that this “something” 
was not an electric current carried along a wire, but more like a 
train of ignited powder burning itself and carrying the explosion 
in short detonations from one end to the other. This meant 
that the nerve actively participated in the transmission of an 
impulse, and did not serve simply as an inert pipe through 
which the impulse was projected. 

Did the nerve breath? If it could be proved that respiration 
—the consumption of oxygen and the production of carbon 
dioxide and heat—took place, nervous activity could be indenti- 
fied as the result of a chemical process not unlike that which 
animates muscles. But the process would be diminutive, since 
nerves are so much smaller than muscles. 

It had already been established that without oxygen the nerve 
lost its power. A Japanese scientist named Tashiro discovered 
that there was a slight increase of carbon dioxide after a nervous 
impulse has passed. Now, if it could be proved that heat was 
produced, the process would be known to be oxidation. 

Dr. Gerard constructed the apparatus with which he hoped to 


183 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


find out if there was any heat produced by a nerve impulse, and 
to measure that heat—if and when created. The instrument 
consisted of a thermopile, an instrument for converting heat into 
electric current, and an inconceivably sensitive apparatus for 
measuring the current. This latter apparatus was composed of 
two galvanometers, or current measurers, connected only by a 
beam of light. 

The scientist removed several nerves from the hip of a frog. 
These nerves can be kept alive for a day or even longer. The 
nerves were laid on the thermopile and were stimulated at one 
end by 280 electrical shocks a second. A single stimulus of 
electricity generated in each of the 3,000 fibers of the nerve one- 
millionth of a millionth of a calory of heat, and the temperature 
rose only one ten-millionth of a degree. 

Measurement of the oxygen consumed and the carbon dioxide 
given off corresponded, Dr. Gerard found, to that of the heat 
produced. 

His conclusion is that the nerve gets its energy from burning 
food-stuffs—not sugar, the oxidation of which produces muscu¬ 
lar energy, but some basic food that he has not yet been able 
to identify. 

So elaborately intergeared is the process, however, that a 
nerve produces in a muscle of the same weight 5,000 times as 
much energy as it uses to stimulate the muscle. In the frog’s 
leg the muscle gives off one million times as much energy as the 
nerve which stimulates it. The nerve is like a fuse exploding 
a charge of dynamite. 


184 



THINKING AS A CHEMICAL PROCESS 


Further experimentation revealed that the nerve fibers con¬ 
tain enough oxygen to remain sensitive or alive for several hours 
of continuous stimulation without receiving oxygen from the 
blood stream. 

This means that when a man is technically dead—when he 
has ceased breathing and injecting oxygen into his blood-stream 
—the fibers of his nerves are still alive, still capable of producing 
the energy to move the muscles of his body. But the “match” 
that ignites these fuses—that is, the nerve center located in the 
brain or the spinal cord—requires seventy times as much oxygen 
as the nerve fibers. The nerve center does not have that reser¬ 
voir of oxygen, and consequently it perishes within three or four 
minutes after respiration ceases. And then the living nerve 
fibers cannot be ignited. 

What has this to do with thought? It proves that nervous 
activity is the result of a basal chemical process. Its connection 
with thought is this: the nerves that control thinking processes 
are of the same general construction as the nerves that control 
action processes. Thus thinking, science believes, is a chemical 
process, resulting, as does action, from oxidation. 

To the familiar formula for achievement—inspiration plus 
perspiration—there may now be added oxidation. The think¬ 
ing that goes into the creation of a sonnet or into such an 
experiment as Dr. Gerardo involves these three factors and 
several thousand others as yet unknown and not, in all prob¬ 
ability, so simple. 


185 



Chapter III 


AS A RAT THINKETH 


HAT does man know about the inside of his own 



V V head? The brain is the most complex mechanism 
known. But does it present the most difficult problems? That 
is a moot question. 

This much is indisputable: it is an organ complicated beyond 
visualization. Anatomists estimate that in the human brain 
there are 12,000,000,000 neurons, or nerve cells. The cortex, or 
outer brain (the gray matter), which comprises more than half 
the brain’s mass and wields a dominating influence in thinking, 
holds 9,200,000,000—more than nine billion—neurons. 

Every one of these cells, physiologists agree, is potentially in 
contact with every other cell through synapsis. These micro¬ 
scopic bridges or couplers, whose nature is as yet largely un¬ 
fathomed, play a significant role in all cellular coordination and 
cooperation. The number of possible combinations of these 
cells is vast beyond comprehension, far exceeding even the 
largest astronomical figures. 

It is but natural, therefore, that the brain should offer a fas¬ 
cinating field of study for science. But unfortunately it is a 
field surrounded by formidable walls. To be sure, brains of 


186 


AS A RAT THINKETH 


dead humans and animals are available by the score—even 
brains with biographies attached. But they are of little use to 
science. Other dead organs may, upon dissection, reveal the 
nature of their former activities—the brain does not. 

Psychology probes it indirectly, seeking to unravel the 
enigmas of the mind. But the physical brain—its structural 
relations and its functional processes—remains in the dark, 
enshrouded by an opaque casing of bone and of skin. 

Until recently, analysis of the brains of dead humans and 
of living and dead lower animals tended generally toward sup¬ 
port of the theory that behavior is localized in special cubicles 
of the brain; that every physical, mental, and emotional reac¬ 
tion is dispatched through the nervous system from a particular 
brain area that handles a single activity and a single habit. 

But ten years of research—the first comprehensive experi¬ 
mentation to determine the relationship between the structure 
of the brain and the learning process—has convinced Professor 
K. S. Lashley that in the rat, and by inference in the human 
being, the mind in solving a problem functions as a mass, with 
scarcely any connection between complex activities and specific 
compartments of the brain. 

The cortex of the rat has a dozen areas architecturally dis¬ 
tinct; the human cortex has more than fifty such areas. It had 
been assumed that difference in structure connoted difference in 
function—that the cortex resembled in principle a telephone 
switchboard in the main office of a department store, each plug 
being connected with a different department. Each department 


187 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


makes its requisition over its private wire to the switchboard, and 
the orders are given over lines extending from the switchboard 
to the supply rooms—one for each department. The orders are 
filled in the supply rooms, and the goods are delivered over 
other marked routes to the sundry departments. An attrac¬ 
tively simple analogy, but it is not supported by the results 
of the latest research. 

Professor Lashley did not attempt to define intelligence 
before he began his work, nor did he claim to have made, at 
its conclusion, any revolutionary incursions into that mysterious 
realm. His research concerned itself only with learning, and 
the limitations in his study of learning were enormous. Rats 
bear a striking resemblance, in many ways, to men, but in other 
respects are almost at opposite poles. Dr. Lashley’s rats were 
tested for their ability to learn with various parts of their brains 
removed, and for the ability to retain knowledge under those 
conditions. 

He undertook his work at the University of Minnesota and 
continued it at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago. 

Early in his investigations he found that the multiple system 
of restricted paths of conduction—the switchboard idea—did 
not function in the neatly patterned manner that had been 
widely accepted as basic. On the contrary, it appeared that 
large masses of nervous tissue participated in the mechanics of 
the brain, and that there was a more generalized and plastic 
principle of correlation than had been assumed. 

He recorded the mental ability and habits of normal rats 


188 



AS A RAT THINKETH 


facing actual problems, and then removed sections of their 
cortex to see what effect the destruction of these structural com¬ 
partments had on the animals’ learning and retaining powers. 
In one or another of his rats, every section of the cortex was 
removed, and the brain then allowed to heal, with the remainder 
of its mass intact, before the animals were subjected to the tests 
that had already been given their normal brothers. 

The investigator terms his own work a “crude preliminary 
survey.” But it is a notable scientific study of the interdepend¬ 
ence of the various parts of the brain, and certainly an im¬ 
pressive contribution to the solution of a vexed question. 

Twenty-two normal rats were subjected to a series of mental 
tests. The most involved proposition that confronted the 
rodents was a maze, or labyrinth, through which the rat under¬ 
going the test had to find its way. The maze consisted of a 
covered box about four feet long. The rat entered through an 
irreversible door at one end, and, unable to get out by the way 
it had come in, had to locate the sole available exit—a door at 
the other end of the box. 

In case the rat happened to be inordinately dull—and some 
of them were—a spread of cheese of the most penetrating frag¬ 
rance was placed just beyond the gate that opened outward and 
led to freedom. Thus even the most phlegmatic were stirred 
to action. 

Having passed through the one-way door, the rat took stock 
of the situation. The interior of the box was divided into four 
parallel streets, connected by openings near the boxed-in termi- 


189 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


nation of each street. The rat had to follow a zigzag path 
through the maze, making four turns, alternately left and right, 
to extricate itself from prison. In case the rat failed to make 
the turn, or turned the wrong way, it ran into a cul-de-sac, or 
blind alley. There were eight of these culs-de-sac —one at each 
end of the four streets. 

Statistics on the ability of the animals to find their way 
through this and various other mazes were compiled, so that 
every time a rat made a false turn or wandered into a cul-de-sac, 
the error was automatically recorded, along with the time con¬ 
sumed in each trial. The number of errors for each trial 
decreased as the rat learned the maze, and the animals were 
given five trials a day until they were able to complete ten 
consecutive trips without making a mistake. 

In case any animals exhibited subnormal intelligence, they 
were discarded after having failed to learn the maze in 150 
trials, which is more than seven times the average required by 
normal animals. The latter took about twenty trials before 
they could achieve ten errorless excursions. 

Professor Lashley’s next problem was a fascinating one. 
When part of the animal’s brain was removed, what happened 
to the faculty that enables a rat to run through a maze? When 
various parts were removed? Did it make any difference in the 
acquisition of knowledge and habit if one section of the cortex 
rather than another was destroyed? 

The localizationists—those who contend that each function 
of mentality is connected by a special transmission line to a 


190 



AS A RAT THINKETH 


specific section of the brain—answered this last question affima- 
tively. Dr. Lashley was skeptical about this localization; he 
was determined to find out for himself. 

Fifty normal rats were conscripted for the tests. The twenty- 
two animals that had been subjected to the tests previously as 
“controls” or subjects of comparison in the process of establish¬ 
ing normal rate statistics, could not be used, since it would be 
impossible to decide how much of its previous contact with the 
problem the rat was able to remember after the operation. 

A different amount of the cortex was destroyed in each 
animal, ranging from areas of 1.5 per cent to 81.2 per cent of 
the total gray matter. The operations were so conducted that 
every compartment of the brain was destroyed in one rat or 
another, while the remaining bulk was left uninjured. 

The operations were performed under deep anaesthesia. 
Having cut through the skin and removed as much of the skull 
as the experiment required, the surgeons destroyed specified 
chambers of the brain with a red-hot, pencil-like instrument. 
The removal was accomplished, in fine, by burning—a method 
that prevents the flow of blood and kills bacteria. In a few 
days the animals had recovered from the physical effects of the 
operation and were ready for the tests. 

Is it harder for an animal to learn when part of its brain has 
been destroyed? 

The answer to that question, as might naturally be inferred, 
was, “Yes.” This revelation, when the operated rats had been 
run through the tests, and the system of analysis had been 


191 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


applied to their trial-and-error efforts, was not sensational. 
But the more subtle results were startling. The operated rats, 
with an average of 31.1 per cent of the cortex removed, required 
61/? times as much practice as did the normal animals before 
they could achieve ten errorless trips through the labyrinth of 
the four-street maze. On simpler mazes, however, the crippled 
rats turned the trick after only 2^ times the practice required 
by their normal brothers. 

Here, then, was discovery No. 1: Brain lesion does not 
affect the ability to conquer simple obstacles to an impressive 
extent. But in the case of involved problems, the impairment 
of ability is greater in proportion, by far, than it is in the 
relatively easy tests. Injury to the brain, then, or destruction 
of part of it, hits hardest the higher intellectual demands, while 
the trivial performances of the mind are retarded to only a 
slight degree. 

Discovery No. 2 follows: Reduction in the capacity to learn 
is roughly proportional to the amount of destruction of the 
cortex. In itself this second fact is again one which might 
easily be assumed. 

But the next step in the investigation disclosed the telltale 
relationship between the brain structure and the mental ability 
of the rat: The same retardation in learning is produced 
by equal destruction in any part of the cortex; that is, the 
damage to the animal’s learning capacity depends simply 
upon the amount of brain-matter destroyed, and is independent 
of the architectural divisions of the mass. 


192 



AS A RAT THINKETH 


Repeated experimentation substantiated the conclusion that 
it makes no difference which part or parts of the cortex were 
destroyed. All of the principal areas were removed from one 
animal or another, and most of the possible combinations of 
these compartments were blocked by cauterization. But the 
results were persistent: the effect of the destruction was quan¬ 
titative, not qualitative. 

Professor Lashley, as a result of these experiments, relegates 
to the limbo of outworn theories the conception of the brain as 
a central bureau in which each performance of the superbly 
organized human machine has its call-box. In short, he nulli¬ 
fies several widespread beliefs of long and sanctimonious stand¬ 
ing. So his work has been, in a double sense, destructive. But 
destruction, when it clears the way for the onward march, is 
the strong right arm of science. 


193 



Chapter IV 


IS WEATHER SENSE GOOD SENSE? 

S OME people know when it is going to rain—but they do 
not know why or how they know. Probably everybody, 
at one time or another, has overheard or participated in a 
conversation something like this: 

“Why, you’re crazy! The sun is shining like a baby’s smile.” 
“I know it is. But just the same—let’s not go to the game 
today. It’s going to rain. I feel it in my bones!” 

“What do you mean—‘feel it in your bones?’ You don’t 
know what you’re talking about.” 

And so he doesn’t. He can’t explain that feeling in his bones. 
And his friend regards him as a crank or an idiot. 

As a matter of fact, the speaker is often right. Rain confirms 
his pessimistic prediction. The other fellow, who went to the 
game, puts in a water-logged appearance later in the day, and 
grumblingly admits what now cannot be denied. Yes, it did 
rain, he assents. “But not because you said it would. You 
can’t make a man in his right mind believe such trash.” 

That was the general attitude, in spite of the fact that the 
alarmist’s forebodings were so often fulfilled. “Superstition” 
was the common verdict. 


194 


IS WEATHER SENSE GOOD SENSE? 


Nevertheless, science has discovered an extremely simple and 
natural explanation of the rheumatic individual’s uncanny 
ability to predict the coming of storms. And apparently the 
same explanation applies to the case of animals that seek shelter 
before there is any apparent indication of an approaching 
disturbance in the weather. 

During his work on an experiment designed to solve an 
abstruse physiological problem, Dr. C. S. Smith, of the Texas 
State Normal College, found that dogs and rats retain water 
under low barometric pressure, and that dogs particularly 
become restless. This discovery turned the scientist’s atten¬ 
tion along lines that resulted in an explanation, at last, of the 
“feeling in the bones” that a storm is imminent. 

A curious fact that has long been known to scientists is that 
starving animals do not lose weight at a steady rate. On the 
contrary, the loss of weight fluctuates, and sometimes the 
animals even gain slightly—only to lose weight more rapidly 
later. 

Several explanations had been offered to interpret this puz¬ 
zling fact, but the one that impressed Dr. Smith the most 
deeply was the theory that on days when the barometric pres¬ 
sure was low—as it always is before bad weather—animals do 
not lose water as rapidly as under ordinary conditions. 

He set out to investigate the possibilities of the theory, with 
dogs and rats as subjects. He used a glass-walled tank in 
which the pressure might be raised or lowered at will. Experi¬ 
mentation developed the fact that under the influence of lowered 


195 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


pressure there was a decrease in the rate at which water was 
eliminated from the body through the kidneys, lungs, and 
sweat glands. Dogs, which have no sweat glands, were ob¬ 
served to become restless after a long period under low pressure. 

Reasoning from these results, Dr. Smith deduced that the 
“weather sense” in certain of the lower animals and in rheumatic 
human beings is conditioned by this retention of water. The 
lower animals feel restless in the low pressure atmosphere which 
precedes storms; and they learn, after a few experiences, to seek 
shelter when this condition recurs. In the same way, it is 
probable that rheumatic persons, whose constitutions and nerves 
are in an abnormal condition, are sensitive to the increased 
hydration of the body tissues which occurs when the atmos¬ 
pheric pressure drops. 

This sensitivity, then, may be the source of that mysterious 
and unaccountable “feeling in the bones” which some people 
experience before the advent of a storm. 

Dr. Smith’s discovery was an accidental by-product of a 
complex investigation. True, it doesn’t make life much richer 
to find out why some people can predict rain. Now if Dr. 
Smith had stumbled on a sure method for prophesying who 
will win the ball game—but maybe it’s only a matter of time. 


196 



Chapter V 


HOW OLD WAS TOM? 

J OHN JOHNSON did not know a great deal—he ad¬ 
mitted it frankly. He did not even know much about his 
seventeen haphazard sons and daughters. But this he did know 
—that if the Oil Company kept bringing strange Indian youths 
around until Judgment Day, he would not recognize any of 
them as his son Tom. He knew that Tom had been killed in 
jumping from a train to elude a railroad detective who objected 
to Tom’s occupancy of the railroad’s rolling stock. John 
Johnson had identified his son’s body, and had taken it home 
and buried it in the family plot—or, more specifically, the 
back-yard of his Oklahoma domicile. 

So much the bronzed and wrinkled old man knew. But he 
did not know why the Oil Company wanted to prove that his 
son was not dead. 

In 1923, two years after Tom’s passing, the United States 
of America had told him that there was oil under the quarter- 
section of land of which this son, a Reservation Indian, had 
been part owner. He testified that Tom was eighteen at the 
time of his death, and the Indian census of 1903 corroborated 
the estimate. And he testified that Tom was dead—completely 
dead. 


197 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


And so, following an offer of a sum of money that startled 
his composure but warmed his heart, John Johnson signed a 
lease as administrator of his son’s estate, assigning the exploita¬ 
tion of the property to a large Oil Company. Then he began 
to enjoy comforts of living which he had never tasted before. 

Two years after the signing of the lease, the Company had 
found the land enormously fruitful. And the more oil that 
was sucked from its depth, the larger John Johnson’s “cut” in 
the profits became. 

Then the Oil Company shrewdly decided to test the validity 
of the contract—on one count or another. Through its counsel, 
it asserted that young Tom Johnson was still alive; that his 
father had depended upon a carelessly sentimental eye in 
identifying a body that had been buried as an anonymous 
cadaver on the railroad’s right of way and then disinterred 
for identification. The mistake must now be rectified by prov¬ 
ing that Tom was still alive. 

Thus it was that the quiet of John Johnson’s abode was 
shattered by the entrance of a file of nondescript young Indians. 
Each of them in turn, sponsored by the Oil Company, eagerly 
presented himself as John Johnson’s missing and now contrite 
prodigal son. 

But the accommodating young men were spurned by the 
Indian as none of his. He averred that he knew what his own 
son looked like, even though he had sixteen other children to 
keep in mind. At last the Oil Company withdrew its barrage 
of claimants and sent them their various ways. 


198 



HOW OLD WAS TOM? 


Unable to prove that any one of their proteges was young 
Johnson, the Company lawyers started on another tack. They 
moved to exhume the body that lay in the blossoming family 
back-yard. For, even granting that the body was Tom’s, if 
it could be established by medical testimony that the young 
man was over twenty-one at the time of his death, the lease 
would be invalid, inasmuch as he had been represented as a 
minor, eighteen years of age. This possibility appealed strongly 
to the Oil Company’s attorneys. 

The body, accordingly, was exhumed. A physician retained 
by the oil interests examined it exhaustively, and testified that 
the individual represented as the deceased part-owner was a 
man of at least twenty-eight years’ growth. 

This assertion he substantiated with the anatomical explana¬ 
tion that there was an apparent closure of the growth centers— 
the ends of the two principal bones in each of the two joints of 
the arms and legs. He based his deduction, he said, on research 
just completed at Western Reserve University, proving that the 
epiphysis, or “floating” end, of the long bone of the shoulder 
unites with the long bone proper between the ages of twenty-five 
and twenty-eight. 

At that University, where study of the union of bones has 
recently produced important new knowledge, a collection of 
1,500 skeletons, all classified by racial stock, age, and sex, had 
been worked upon for several years by Professors Todd and 
Stevenson, two noted physical anthropologists. They proved 
conclusively that the age of a person, living or dead, can be 


199 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


determined by X-ray examination or actual inspection of this 
bone growth. 

But the conclusion propounded by the petroleum people’s 
physician was not accepted by the representatives of old 
Johnson. His attorneys happened to be acquainted with the 
trend of work at Western Reserve Laboratory, and they sent 
their story thither. A young research worker attached to the 
University staff was dispatched southwestward. His name was 
Wilton M. Krogman. 

Krogman had the body exhumed again. He spent several 
days in its company. As a result of his examination, he 
announced that the Oil Company’s physician had been mis¬ 
taken in his findings. Krogman declared that the state of the 
epiphyseal union of the bones placed the age of the boy between 
eighteen and twenty years, with an indication that his exact 
age was eighteen years and seven months. His evidence pro¬ 
claimed the old Indian triumphant over a potent corporation 
and its keenest legal talent. 

Here, in brief, is the scientist’s report: 

(1) The head of the humerus (upper arm) is not united 
to the shaft. This places the corpse’s age under twenty, because 
this union always takes place at that age. (2) the distal, 
or lower ends, of the radius and ulna (the two bones consti¬ 
tuting the skeleton of the forearm) are not united with the 
actual shafts of the bones. This places Tom Johnson at under 
nineteen. (3 ) But the epiphyses of the tibia and fibula (the two 
bones constituting the skeleton of the lower leg) show signs of 


200 



HOW OLD WAS TOM? 


beginning union with the shafts—a condition which places the 
boy’s age at over eighteen, and, by virtue of the progress of 
union in the leg bones, at eighteen years and about seven 
months. 

By such criteria, the age of a person can be determined in 
stages of one year through a considerable period. The eruption 
of the teeth is an early determinant. At seven, the epiphyseal 
union of the bones becomes calculable. The epiphyses are at 
the juncture between the bones proper and the segments of bone 
which adjoin their ends. The connection is maintained, in 
babyhood, by the existence of cartilage, a translucent, elastic 
tissue popularly known as gristle. These segments fit into other 
bones, or into other segments, which form the joints. 

As the body develops, these segments, or epiphyses, gradu¬ 
ally unite with the bones by the process of ossification of the 
cartilage, a transformation that turns the cartilage into bone. 
This ossification is accomplished through the contribution by 
the blood cells of bone material in the chemical form of calcium 
salts. The deposition of organic salts gives the body structure 
an increasing rigidity with the progressive destruction of the 
cartilage. Thus, elderly persons’ bones are increasingly brittle. 

At the age of seven, the epiphyses for the head of the humerus 
and the bone’s greater and lesser trochanters (the two rough 
prominences in the upper part of the femur which serve for 
the attachment of muscles) unite as one fixture, although the 
ultimate union of this new entity with the shaft of the arm itself 
takes place at twenty. 


201 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


At twelve and one-half to fourteen and one-half the epiphyses 
for the phalanges—or digital bones—of the hands and feet 
unite. On the femur, popularly known as the thigh bone, the 
condyle, or “kunckle,” unites with the shaft at nineteen, and 
the two trochanters are joined at eighteen. 

After the general closure of the epiphyses, the theme of 
growth is taken up by the skull sutures. These sutures, three 
in number, are the junctions of the four bones that form the 
skull in early life. They close gradually, beginning at the age 
of twenty-two, and have as a rule completely closed at forty- 
seven. By the stages of closure in all three (the process begins 
in the cleft at the front of the head, continues in that of the 
crown, and ends in the one on the back of the skull) the age 
of a person can be determined with reasonable exactness well 
into middle life. 

By his own admission John Johnson did not know a great 
deal. What he did know, he divulged without hesitation. 
What he did not know, such as the lore of epiphyseal union, he 
did not bestir himself to learn. When the experts had with¬ 
drawn from his presence, he shook his head in a puzzled 
fashion. But he learned at last that the Oil Company would 
go on paying him for Tom’s land—and that was really all 
he wanted to know. 


202 



PART VII 


c 


Chapter I 


“SHOOTING” THE MOON 

AN AMAZING super-cinema has been announced. It 
jL JLhas not been bill-boarded yet, nor has it appeared at 
any popular theater. In all probability it never will. 

The story portrayed by this film has never been put on 
celluloid before. It is unique in that the scene of the picture 
(there is only one) is two hundred and forty thousand miles 
away from the camera. Stranger still is the fact that the sole 
actor in the story is located ninety-three millions of miles away 
from the scene depicted. 

A super-production it is, although it was not made in or 
near a movie studio, and the motion picture industry as a 
whole knew nothing about its manufacture. 

Scientists have just succeeded in “shooting” a motion picture 
of sunrise on the moon. This novel contribution to man’s 
knowledge of the universe in which his earth is merely a cog 
has been achieved at Princeton University, where Professor 
John Q. Stewart directed the recording of the phenomenon 
by means of combining the properties of a motion picture 
camera with the magnifying power of the 23-inch astronomical 
telescope at the university’s observatory. Robert F. Arnott, 

205 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


a New Jersey consulting engineer, perfected the mechanism for 
the experiment. 

With the moon nine days “old”—that is, two days past the 
first quarter, the powerful telescope was focused on the earth’s 
satellite 240,000 miles out in the heavens. 

To the eye-piece of the telescope, which enlarges the image 
of the distant body in the manner of a microscope and then 
concentrates it so that it can be encompassed by the human eye, 
was attached an amateur motion picture camera, using a 16- 
millimeter film and driven by an electric motor. Both the 
motor and the camera were contained in a metal box, and the 
focusing and operating speed were controlled by attachments 
on the exterior of the box. 

The telescope is an instrument thirty feet tall, weighing 
thirty tons, and had to be adjusted every two seconds to 
avoid blurring of the motion pictures. For four continuous 
hours the operators guided the delicately combined mechanisms. 

Projected on a regulation motion picture screen, the film dis¬ 
closes in enlarged form, within the course of four minutes, 
what an astronomer would see in four hours of tedious, un¬ 
relieved observation through the telescope. The film fur¬ 
nishes for the first time a permanent record of what happens 
on this barren, ghostly globe that pursues its methodical course 
around the earth, century after century, with never a sign of 
insubordination to the planet to which it is lashed by gravity. 

The moon, the earth’s nearest empyreal neighbor and its 
only stepchild, has been studied by man at relatively close 


206 



‘SHOOTING” THE MOON 


range since the invention of the telescope three hundred years 
ago. Photographs of it, in repose, taken telescopically, reveal 
it to us as a “dead” body, much similar to the earth and far 
different from the violently incandescent sun and most stars. 

Little happens on the moon to induce adventurers to pack 
up their clean shirts, button on their greatcoats, and set off 
for the unpromising land on a skyrocket, a kite, or a bicycle. 
We know that its surface is devoid of life; at least no trace 
of the type of animate organisms that inhabit the earth has 
ever been seen there, and we know that if life exists in lunar 
regions it must be one that we cannot conceive, one that pros¬ 
pers without air and without water, for the moon has neither. 

Without water and air, the moon is a naked place, where 
there are no clouds and no mists, no dawn, no twilight. 

While the earth rotates on its axis once in twenty-four hours, 
presenting all of its faces to the sun during that period, the 
moon itself ambles around once in about thirty of our days. 
Consequently, the sun shines on the moon for nearly fifteen 
of our days, never dimmed or softened by a cloud or an atmos¬ 
phere. Baked and parched by the furious solar rays, the sur¬ 
face rocks of the moon are heated almost to the boiling point 
of water. 

Then, as the sphere turns itself elliptically out of the sun’s 
range, night falls in a sudden curtain, as though the sun had 
been switched off like an electric light. Without any blanket 
of air to retain the heat of the day, the temperature drops 
rapidly. In two hours the freezing point is reached, and before 


207 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


day breaks again, two weeks later, the temperature has de¬ 
scended to between 200 and 300 degrees below zero, Fahren¬ 
heit. 

Static photographs of this phenomenon in various stages 
have been taken for many years, but the successful experiment 
at Princeton marks the first animated picture of the coming of 
day and night—the only activity, although it is a borrowed 
one, that transpires on the moon. 

Only one other form of change, scientists assert, occurs on the 
moon. A diffused hail of small, stray particles, most of them 
rocks, must be falling upon the satellite daily. We know that 
twenty millions of these particles of cosmic matter, or “star¬ 
dust,” fall into the earth’s atmosphere every day. We call 
them meteorites, and often they can be seen hurtling through 
the heavens, attracted by the earth’s gravity. Our atmosphere 
protects us from the direct striking action of these bodies, 
for they have lost most of their velocity before they reach 
the surface. 

Allowing for the greater attraction of the earth and the 
smaller area of the moon, over a million of these particles, 
invisible from the earth, must strike the moon every twenty- 
four hours. Astronomers note that since the moon has no 
atmosphere to consume these projectiles or check their momen¬ 
tum they must rain down upon its surface at every conceivable 
angle, traveling at a speed as high as 44 miles a second. 

Therefore, as a result of this bombardment, there must be 
a continual wearing process, somewhat similar to the erosion 


208 



“SHOOTING” THE MOON 

of the earth’s surface by water and wind, going on upon the 
moon. But we can only postulate this, since it is invisible. 

The new super-production features a “close-up” of an area 
of 200 miles by 330 miles on the moon’s surface. In the 
center of this area is seen Copernicus, the giant crater named 
in honor of the Polish astronomer who in the sixteenth century 
promulgated the now long-established theory that the sun is 
the center of our planetary system. The mountain walls which 
form the almost perfect circle of this crater are two miles high, 
and the diameter of the hollow pit is fifty-six miles. 

There are 30,000 of these craters on that hemisphere of the 
moon which is always facing the earth, and some of them reach 
diameters of fifty, sixty, and even 100 miles, and depths of 
10,000 feet. Photographs of the full moon reveal a prepon¬ 
derance of extensive smooth basins in the central part of the 
hemisphere facing us, as compared with the elevated, moun¬ 
tainous areas that pervade the rim. The craters in these 
basins are few and small, while on the uplands and moun¬ 
tainous tracts of the rim appear pits in great numbers and of 
huge size, many of them surpassing in breadth and depth the 
volcanic craters of the earth. 

The late Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, originator of the 
planetesimal hypothesis of the origin of the earth (a theory, 
now generally accepted among scientists, that the world began 
small and cold and accumulated matter that, like itself, had 
been sent whirling into space by the sun), suggested shortly 
before his death, in 1928, that the vast basin areas of the moon 


209 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


are heavier than the mountainous areas, and that we see the 
heavy end, or hemisphere, of our satellite. This theory, which 
is congruous with the planetesimal hypothesis, serves as the first 
reasonable explanation of the hitherto baffling fact that the 
moon turns only one side to the earth. 

Science recognized long ago that this phenomenon meant 
that as the moon makes one revolution around the earth it 
rotates exactly once around its own axis. It is easily perceived 
that if there were any change in this one-rotation-per-one-revo- 
lution combination, the moon would not be able to keep this 
same side to the earth at every point in its journey. 

What agency acts as a stabilizer to correct any influence 
that might tend to change the moon’s rotative relation to the 
earth? That the gravity of the earth holds the moon in its 
orbit is obvious. This same gravity holds to the earth every 
body on its surface, and in the air and water surrounding 
the earth. Any bird, balloon, or airplane that might make 
a round-the-world trip, or one revolution around the earth, 
would rotate precisely once on its journey and thus keep the 
same “face”—the bottom of the basket of the balloon, and the 
underside of the bird and the airplane—toward the earth. 

Since the rotation around its axis is so slow as to be imper¬ 
ceptible in an airplane flying around the world, the principle is 
hard to comprehend. But it becomes clear if we envision a 
“loop-the-loop,” in which the airplane makes a small revolu¬ 
tion and a striking rotation, whereby it keeps its underside 
facing the imaginary object around which it revolves. 


210 



‘SHOOTING” THE MOON 


Both the moon and the airplane are held to the earth by 
gravity. The one-rotation-per-one-revolution principle, on 
which the moon and the airplane both appear to operate, is 
known to depend on three factors: gravity; a heavier and a 
lighter end, with the heavier end responding more strongly to 
the gravitational pull, as in the case of the balloon basket and 
the underside of the bird and of the airplane; and a resisting 
medium—the atmosphere, in the case of the balloon, the bird, 
and the airplane—sufficient to give the heavier end an advan¬ 
tage and cause it to take the position nearest the center of grav¬ 
ity—the earth—and keep it. 

Does the moon have a heavier and a lighter end? Does 
the moon have a resisting medium around it? 

Chamberlin collected evidence that tallies perfectly with the 
major principles of his earth-origin hypothesis. And he an¬ 
swered these two questions in the affirmative, thus indicating 
that “the moon is dynamically a part of the more intimate 
system of action to which the high-flying bird, the balloon, 
and the flying plane belong,” and that the problem of its rota¬ 
tion falls into line with that of these familiar things of earth. 

The great geologist, his genius undimmed by eighty-five 
years and the imminence of death, reasoned that as the moon 
grew by the accretion of material in space, one end became 
denser than the other, so that its hemispheres became unequal 
in density—just as did the earth’s, with all of the continents 
except Australia in one hemisphere and almost all the water 
basins, except the Atlantic and the Arctic, in the other. 


211 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Thus this heavy end, the basin-hemisphere, of the moon 
constantly faces us, and it is held in that position by the re¬ 
sisting medium of the rain of meteorites through which it is 
passing, and the gaseous molecules of the earth’s ultra-atmos¬ 
phere through which it revolves. 

“Shooting” the moon is the most recent of several revela¬ 
tions regarding that body achieved within the last few years. 
If “God’s last nickel thrown across the counter of the skies” 
has any more secrets, it had better hide them well. 


212 



Chapter II 


NEW LIGHT ON THE WORLD’S BIRTH 



*HE world is coming to an end—but not for a while. 


JL The terror of a sudden blackness and the chaotic ob¬ 
literation of the whole earth, with everything on it, has pur¬ 
sued mankind down the ages. But the twentieth century tenant 


of the globe, more complacent than his ancestors, goes about 
his business from day to day with never a thought of a 


cosmic catastrophe which will write an unexpected Finis to 
the checkered history of the world. 

And yet the ultimate destruction of the earth at some time 
in the future is a consummation against which science is 
powerless to underwrite an insurance policy. The same kind 
of cataclysm that created our planet will in all probability 
eventually demolish it. 

But—and it is an immensely reassuring but —such a cata¬ 
clysm, according to the reckoning of astronomers, can occur 
only once in a period of a thousand times a million times a 
million years. And as the last cataclysm of the sort occurred 
only a fraction of that period of years ago, there is no likeli¬ 
hood of a repetition of the fireworks for untold millions of 
years to come, 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


And there is another fact to fortify our peace of mind as 
to the chances of the earth’s outlasting our generation: about 
100,000 years before the catastrophe takes place, a warning 
of its approach will be visible in the skies. 

This assurance is based on a theory of the creation of the 
earth, suggested by Dr. Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin and 
Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, thirty years ago, and now known 
as the planetesimal hyphothesis. This explanation quickly 
supplanted all previous theories, including that of the French 
astronomer, Laplace, which held sway during the nineteenth 
century. 

According to the planetesimal theory, our planetary family 
was fathered by a cataclysm that occurred when a passing star 
—or sun—in its journey through space swerved in a hyperbola 
past our sun at tremendous velocity, three to five billion years 
ago. 

This visiting star, smaller than our sun and probably dull 
or dead, must have approached from the southern heavens 
somewhere between the empty space now occupied by the 
“inner” planets (the four nearest the sun—Mercury, Venus, 
Earth, and Mars) and that which contains the “outer” four 
(Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—if we disregard, for 
the moment, the newly discovered ninth planet). 

The momentum of the star prevented it from colliding with 
our sun as it sped by. But, although the two bodies passed 
each other at a distance of millions of miles, terrific tidal forces 
were called into action. 


214 



NEW LIGHT ON THE WORLD’S BIRTH 


From cones drawn out at the sun’s equatorial belt by the 
passing star’s “pull,” gaseous bolts that were to form the 
planetary family were shot forth in four double eruptions. 

As Uranus was pulled out in the star’s wake it became the 
earth’s twin, the earth being shot out simultaneously from the 
opposite side of the sun. 

The four bolts of gaseous substances ejected toward the direc¬ 
tion taken by the star formed the larger outer planets, while 
those fired in the opposite direction became the inner planets. 
These planet bolts emerged in accordance with the physical laws 
governing such phenomena, with a spiral and vortical whirl 
which aided their gathering into rotating solid masses. 

The star that had in the course of its stroll through the 
heavens come near enough to our sun to draw these masses 
from it did not have sufficient mass itself to absorb the bolts, 
but it gave them enough of its dynamic energy to throw them 
into nearly circular revolution about the sun, where the force 
that draws them toward the sun is offset by the force that 
draws them away, so that they are held in equilibrium and 
circle perpetually about the sun. 

These clusters of matter ejected from the sun quickly became 
cold, and as they traveled in their orbits they gathered up 
swarms of smaller bits of matter (planetesimals, or little plan¬ 
ets), and grew in bulk until they attained their present size. 

The satellites, of which our moon is one of twenty-six re¬ 
volving around the various planets, were explained by Dr. 
Chamberlin in a book published shortly before his death in 


215 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


November, 1928, as partly the result of eddies of the main 
planetary bolts, separated from the main swarm by the “drag” 
at the outer edges of the whorl, and partly as eruptions second¬ 
ary and reactionary to the major discharges. 

These satellite masses remained far enough from their re¬ 
spective planetary swarms to form independent cores at their 
various centers of gravity, but close enough to stay within the 
control of the respective planets and revolve around them. 

The earth has long since collected all the planetesimals in its 
reach, and is now undergoing no appreciable growth, although 
there is a constant infall of insignificant meteorites. 

The “creep” of the axes of planets and their satellites (in¬ 
cluding that of our own earth, which has a twenty-three degree 
inclination in its rotation) is explained by the fact that the 
spirally whirling planetesimals struck the central mass at one 
angle more than at any other, and thus gradually shifted the 
axis. 

Such is the story of the creation of the earth, and of the 
other planets, which together with their satellites, constitute 
the solar system. Of course, it is not the “true” story if 
the presence of witnesses is necessary to establish truth; but it 
is true in so far as science can judge from the mass of evidence 
that accumulates in each day’s and each night’s research by 
men of integrity and scientific insight in every corner of the 
world. 

The Laplacian theory, which saw the solar system as a 
mass of hot gas that cooled and contracted to form the planets, 


216 



NEW LIGHT ON THE WORLD’S BIRTH 


with the residue organizing itself as the present sun, crumbled 
under half a dozen discoveries during the decade before and 
the decade after the turn of the twentieth century. 

The planetesimal hypothesis has since been adopted through¬ 
out the world, almost as it was in its original form. The 
Chamberlin-Moulton conception is glorious, though it looks 
at the earth with amazing humility. 

“Nothing whatever has been found in the record to imply 
that the birth of the earth was a feature of the absolute begin¬ 
ning of the universe,” Dr. Chamberlin wrote at eighty-five, 
just before he died. “The inquiry has led to the impression 
that the creation of our planetary system was but an incident 
in the history of our sun, while even the genesis of the sun 
might not improbably be but an incident in the history of 
our stellar galaxy.” 

The universe is an orderly household. The movements of 
the earth and its fellow planets, and of the sun and its millions 
of fellow suns, are never haphazard or capricious, Dr. Moulton 
tells us. 

The astronomer is able to turn his telescope today on a 
point in the heavens that will be crossed by one of the major 
stars on any given date in the future. It can be done without 
the remotest chance of error, despite the fact that a star, mov¬ 
ing, as stars do, about 600,000,000 miles a year would not 
appear to the naked eye to have moved an inch in a thousand 
years. 

Because man recognizes, either consciously or unconsciously, 


217 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


that the universe is an orderly household, he goes about his 
work and his play with never an apprehensive glance at the 
sky for some sign of the worlds imminent destruction. 

It is true that the path of our sun will be approached again 
by some unknown star, in the dim and distant future. Then 
the earth and its fellow planets will be caught up into the arms 
of a new spiral nebula, to give birth to another generation of 
planets. It will be a fresh shuffling of the cosmic cards. 


218 



Chapter III 


FINDING THE NINTH PLANET 

T HREE HUNDRED years after Columbus discovered 
America, a musician, Sir William Herschel, constructed 
a rude telescope. Whiling away his time, with no thought 
of new worlds, he chanced to focus his glass on the first new 
planet to be recognized in modern times. 

After a good deal of disputation among learned societies, 
the newcomer into our planetary family was named Uranus, 
the Greek personification of the heavens. This was in keeping 
with the mythological names of the six planets that were already 
“old” when Alexander wept for new worlds to conquer. 

Conquerors of new worlds had only about a half-century 
wait this time until, in 1846, another of the earth’s brothers 
in the retinue of the sun was discovered. It was Neptune, 
traveling in a far-flung orbit around the sun. Neptune was 
first sighted, not in the sky, but in the most astonishing mathe¬ 
matical deduction ever made. 

Uranus wobbled. Astronomers did not say that. They 
said it varied orbitally; that is, it had wandered in its leisurely 
path around the sun and had failed to appear at the spot in 
its normal orbit at which mathematicians had made a pencil 


219 


STEPS IN THE DARK 


mark on their charts of the heavens. No, it was not lost— 
just strayed. And strayed only a negligible few miles. Neg¬ 
ligible, so far as the delivery of tomorrow’s milk was con¬ 
cerned, but vital to the fraternity of men who prescribed routes 
for worlds a billion miles away. 

The key to the mystery was found almost simultaneously 
by two young astronomers working independently and un¬ 
known to each other. The two scientists calculated, from the 
extent of Uranus’s deviation from its proper orbit, just where 
in the celestial spaces beyond the known planetary system a 
new world must be. 

One of the two youths—Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, a 
Frenchman—asked Johann Gottfried Galle to took at this spot 
from his renowned observatory in Berlin. Herr Galle looked, 
but was disappointed. However, he made a chart of his find¬ 
ings and compared it with previous charts of that same section 
of the heavens. Lo! He had sighted a new “star.” This new 
luminary—just a pin point of light as seen through his telescope 
—turned out to be the planet later called Neptune, another 
world, spinning along almost three billions of miles from the 
sun, so far away that it takes about 164 years to make a com¬ 
plete revolution around the solar body. 

The other astronomer, an Englishman, was John Couch 
Adams. He had made a computation almost identical with 
that of Leverrier. A British telescope, focused on the predicted 
spot in the same year, located the planet, which, here also, was 
at first mistaken for a star. 


220 



FINDING THE NINTH PLANET 


Old Sol's family now consisted of eight planets, five of them 
—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—having been 
known to the ancients on the sixth planet—Earth—as bright 
stars. All of them, of course, were visible to the naked eye. 
In the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus blasted the 
theory that these five planets, together with the sun, the moon, 
and the stars, revolved around the earth. 

Uranus had been discovered telescopically, and Neptune was 
appended to the panorama by a mathematical miracle. Minor 
members of the solar family included hundreds of small planets, 
or planetoids. The earth and Neptune were known to have 
one moon each, Mars two, Uranus four, Saturn and Jupiter 
each nine. Besides these bodies there had been noted occasional 
comets flitting into the solar system and out again. 

But Uranus still wobbled. It wobbled just as much, of 
course, as it always had. But a few astronomers insisted that 
the gravity of Neptune failed to account for all of Uranus’s 
orbital variations. 

A new world, a ninth child of the sun, lay beyond Neptune, 
they said, and its presence was butting Uranus out of the 
delicate orbit that had already been dented by the gravity of 
Neptune. Camille Flammarion, in his L’Astronomie Popu¬ 
late, published in 1863, predicated the existence of the undis¬ 
covered body, “a large planet, sailing at 4,000 millions of miles 
from the sun in a revolution of about 330 years.” 

Flammarion died. There were no telescopes powerful 
enough to see a body so small and so far away. But while 


221 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


the laity went on about its business of patching up this old 
world to make it livable for another few centuries, the 
astronomers kept their eyes open, year after year, for uncharted 
worlds lolling in the depths of space. 

It was not a case of heroic poses at the nether end of sky¬ 
scraping telescopes; it was charts filled with prosaic, abstruse 
mathematics—algebra, trigonometry, geometry, calculus, and 
celestial ballistics. You did not look nonchalantly up at the 
stars and exclaim, “Ah, there! A new planet!” You discovered 
new worlds on paper now, if you discovered them at all. 

The charts were not romantic; but at the end of those 
charts, at the end of thousands of them, lay—perhaps—another 
earth, another manifestation of creative genius that transcends 
everything human but imagination. That was romantic. 

Percival Lowell, brother of a well-known University presi¬ 
dent and of a famous woman poet, was a romantic. Traveler 
and dilettante, he turned his versatile mind to astronomy and 
built with his own wealth an observatory in the clear, crystalline 
air of Arizona. It was at Flagstaff, a town at the pine-wooded 
foot of the San Francisco Mountains. 

In his temple-like laboratory he continued the search for a 
new world. By 1905 he was sure of the existence of “X,” the 
trans-Nepunian planet. He predicted its location, the orbit 
of its course around the sun. But there were no telescopes pow¬ 
erful enough to pick out a body so small and so far away. 

In 1916 Astronomer Lowell died and was buried at the 
foot of his observatory. His followers took up his work, 


222 



FINDING THE NINTH PLANET 


and at this observatory, as at others in different parts of the 
world, the work went ahead in noncommittal silence. 

March 13, 1930, was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 
birth of Percival Lowell and the one hundred and forty-ninth 
anniversary of the first modern discovery of a planet—that of 
Uranus in 1781. On that March day of 1930, Professor Har¬ 
low Shapley, director of the Harvard University observatory at 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, received a breath-taking communi¬ 
cation from Dr. V. M. Slipher, Lowell’s successor at Flag¬ 
staff. It read: 

Systematic research begun years ago, supplementing Lowell’s 
investigation for a tr an s-Neptunian planet, has revealed an 
object which for seven weeks has in rate of motion and path 
consistently conformed to trans-Neptunian body at the ap¬ 
proximate distance he assigned . Fifteenth magnitude . Posi¬ 
tion March 12, at three hours Greenwich mean time, was seven 
seconds of time west from Delta Geminorum, agreeing with 
Lowell’s predicted longitude . 

And so, on March 13, 1930, a new world was officially 
bom. Our little old world gasped. It had a baby brother. 
But people wondered. . . . What did the “systematic 
research begun years ago” mean? 

It was then that the public learned how worlds are discovered. 
Lowell’s staff included many eminent scientists, all of whom 
had faith in the existence of this planet out beyond Neptune. 
With Lowell they had computed its location. The elusive 
planet was born on paper in 1905. But it lay deeper in the 

223 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


heavens than man’s eye and existing telescopes could fathom. 
As the years went by and science devised new telescopes, en¬ 
larging the universe ten thousand times in twenty-five years, 
the ninth marcher in the parade around the sun paced its 
orbit as it had done for forgotten aeons—but for man it was 
still on paper. 

Predictions of the new world’s location were many now. 
Some of them, contradictory to Lowell’s, were advanced by 
noted astronomers. But it was generally agreed that the 
planet really existed out there in the cosmic wastes the other 
side of Neptune. There were plenty of recipes for finding 
the unseen planet, and every great observatory was trying to 
set the net for it. 

It happened that in 1929 the Flagstaff observatory acquired 
a new instrument, christened the Lawrence Lowell telescope, 
in honor of the astronomer’s brother, the president of Harvard. 
It was a comparatively small affair—a thirteen-inch “triplet,” 
but the most powerful device of its kind. The 100-inch tele¬ 
scope at Mount Wilson in California, the 72-inch instrument 
at Victoria, in British Columbia, and the 40-inch lens at 
Yerkes observatory in Wisconsin, were giants in their field, but 
they could not catch this speck of a planet. It would be like 
a Colossus looking for a needle. The Lowell telescope was 
short, its vision was attuned to the relatively tiny solar system, 
and its perspective was broad. 

The youthful Alexander had sighed for new worlds. Two 
fledgelings had found the latest world—Neptune. A youth 


224 



FINDING THE NINTH PLANET 


of twenty-four was destined to present the “new” world to man. 
Clyde W. Tombaugh, an astronomer of a year and an assistant 
at the Lowell observatory, detected a strange “blotch of light” 
on a photographic plate that he was developing in the dark¬ 
room at Flagstaff on the night of January 21, 1930. The 
photograph was one taken by a camera infinitely more delicate 
and sensitive than the human eye—the glass of that 13-inch 
telescope. 

Tombaugh carried the plate to Dr. Slipher, who notified 
the six other astronomers at the station. Then the staff of the 
observatory studied the tiny speck that men had been looking 
for during some eighty years. 

What happened when these men, as a result of their exami¬ 
nation, realized that a new world had been captured? How 
was it rung in? 

No one, except that little group of men, and a few of 
their intimates, is likely to know. It was a moment of epochal 
triumph, but there were no newspaper representatives standing 
about. But young Tombaugh, who has priority as the first 
human being to see the ninth planet, has been prevailed upon 
by the press to write his story: 

And what did the others say when I called them in to 
see it? Well, you know how these astronomers are . They 
are used to thinking in terms of millions of years and millions 
of miles . They werent excited . They said it might possibly 
be the lurking Lowell planet , but they would have to watch 
it further to check it with data they had been gathering so long . 

225 



STEPS IN THE DARK 


Night after night the Lowell telescope sought and photo¬ 
graphed anew the errant planet. It moved slightly in the 
same direction as the other planets. 

The whole vast bulk of computations, beginning with Perci- 
val Lowell’s earliest reckonings, was unearthed from the ob¬ 
servatory’s files. With just a modicum of pride, these star¬ 
gazers of the desert kept their secret. They might have en¬ 
listed the assistance of the Harvard observatory, with which 
they were affiliated, or that of any of the other great astronom¬ 
ical centers in America and abroad. 

But they were not yet sure; they did not want to broadcast 
the discovery of a new world one night and then have to re¬ 
tract it the next. And they wished Percival Lowell’s name to 
have the glory that the man Percival Lowell would have 
shunned. So they walked softly. 

By the twelfth of March, they were ready to present their 
discovery. The next day it was formally announced. Within 
two weeks the existence of the new planet had been substan¬ 
tiated by the great observatories of the world, most of which 
had been scouring the skies for the mysterious stranger but 
had, unfortunately, been looking in the wrong place. 

One after another, astronomical stations equipped for so 
delicate a task reported having photographed the elusive speck. 
The new planet was placed at 4,650,000,000 miles from the 
sun, which is forty-five times as far from the sun as the earth 
is. As Lowell estimated, its year is 300 times longer than 
the earth’s. 


226 



FINDING THE NINTH PLANET 


But the astronomers drew a picture of conditions on the 
new planet that would effectively kill the enthusiasm of a real 
estate agent. The uncommonly wide breach over which the 
parent sun has to heave its lighting and warming rays to its 
most distant offspring allows the trans-Neptunian planet only 
one two-thousandths as much light and heat as the earth gets, 
so that this distant world has to get along as best it can in 
a murkiness no brighter than moonlight. Its temperature is, 
it would seem, much lower than even that of Neptune, where 
most substances of earth would be frozen solid. 

Tentative results of observations made by Dr. John Q. 
Stewart, of Princeton University, indicate that the new world 
is black as coal, nearly as dense as iron, and twice as dense 
as the heaviest terrestrial rocks. 

Because of the great pull of gravity, according to Dr. Stewart, 
a man—if we can conceive one on such a planet—could jump 
less than half as far as he could here on the earth. The 
planet’s density is between 6 and 7, taking the standard of water 
density as 1. Its diameter is fourteen thousand miles. 
Weighted by its great gravity, a 150-pound man would tip the 
scales there at something like 325 pounds. 

All in all, not an attractive abode. But the discovery of 
the new planet pushes the frontiers of our solar system nearly 
two billion miles out into the dark. 


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